


All of Time and Space

by ennyousai



Category: Star Trek XI
Genre: Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-29
Updated: 2010-10-29
Packaged: 2017-10-12 23:16:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/130218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ennyousai/pseuds/ennyousai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When exploring the ruins of a forgotten civilization, Captain Jim Kirk finds himself transported to a time and place far out of his comfort zone. First Officer Spock attempts to find a way to retrieve him, but Jim is more intrigued by his meeting with a doctor who has memories that he shouldn't have...</p>
            </blockquote>





	All of Time and Space

**Author's Note:**

> This is written for the 2010 Star Trek Big Bang Challenge.

  
**Prologue - Osiris VI, Stardate 2261.123**   


Osiris VI was a desolate world. There was evidence that it had once been a place of splendor and beauty - immense temples whose facades were covered with intricate carvings, streets laid out in a neat, orderly fashion, monuments that spoke to the indigenous civilization's many achievements - but by the time the _Enterprise_ landing party beamed down to the surface, the planet was little more than a vast mausoleum. The finer details of the carvings had been worn away by wind and rain, and the pavement stones were almost completely obscured by a thick carpet of blue-gray weeds. Most eerie of all was the lack of inhabitants. In spite of all the signs of the city's past as a thriving metropolis, the only sounds that could be heard now were the sighing of the wind and the occasional rattling cries of the reptilian creatures that seemed to be the only remaining life-form.

"What happened here?" wondered Jim as he, Spock, and Evans made their way into the remains of what appeared to be the main temple complex. "There's no sign of a nuclear holocaust, or any kind of extended war. Maybe it was some kind of cataclysmic event that changed their climate?"

"That is certainly a possibility." Spock gazed intently at his tricorder, brow furrowed in concentration as he analyzed the data. "It could not have been recent, however. I am not detecting any trace particles in the atmosphere that would indicate such a disturbance."

"Disease, then. Or crop blight." A shadow passed briefly over Jim's face; even after a decade the memories of Tarsus IV were far too close to the surface. "But whatever it was, it wasn't large-scale warfare."

"No," agreed Spock. "It was not."

They fell silent as they crossed the threshold into the main vestibule. The scale was astonishing, with pillars that were easily three times taller than any of the ones in Earth's ancient temples, and the staircases leading up toward the surrounding balconies had steps that were half as tall as Spock. The three humans were dwarfed by their surroundings, and yet instead of being merely imposing the space retained a sense of elegant grace. Large windows made the space light and airy, and elaborate, multi-colored mosaics gleamed like deep-sea jewels beneath the floor's thick layer of dust. Still, despite its beauty, Jim shivered as they ventured farther into the dim interior. The entire place filled him with a bone-deep sadness, the weight of its history pressing down on his shoulders, and the air was thick with the echoes of happier times.

"Captain!" Evans had wandered farther ahead and was waving back at him and Spock, his young face bright with excitement. "Look over here. There's some kind of writing on the wall."

Spock made his way over to the lieutenant, leaning over to examine the lines of intricate hieroglyphs carved deep into the stone. Jim started forward as well, then paused, frowning as something caught his eye.

A statue of an angel stood in a side alcove, its shapely form dimly illuminated by a faint beam of light filtering in through a crack in the ancient ceiling. Jim raised his eyebrows and stepped closer, curiosity piqued. Osiris VI was thousands of light years distant from Earth, and the Federation had never had contact with this system before. Furthermore, the carvings they'd seen on the temple walls portrayed beings who resembled humans only on the most basic level, with feathery appendages in place of hair and dramatic ridges of bone emerging from their shoulders. This angel, however, with its wings folded against its back and its hands covering its face in a gesture of mourning, would have looked quite at home in any one of the great European cathedrals. It was an anomaly. It was bizarre.

It was so very, very intriguing.

Jim reached out and brushed his fingers lightly over the gray stone. It was smooth and cool to the touch, the details in its hair and clothing as sharp and clear as if they'd been carved yesterday. It was undeniably beautiful, the work of a master artisan, and its posture conveyed such a deep sense of loss and sorrow that it made Jim's own heart grow heavy.

"What _are_ you doing here," he murmured, shaking his head in bemusement. He was at a complete loss - he couldn't think of a single explanation for why a statue whose imagery was so strongly reminiscent of Earth would be here on Osiris VI. He shrugged. Maybe Spock would have some ideas.

"Hey Spock," he called out and turned away from the statue. "Spock, there's something -"

He never finished his sentence. His words hung unfinished in the heavy stillness of the temple, and when Spock and Lieutenant Evans hurried back to him all they saw were dust motes dancing through the air and a motionless statue whose face was hidden in grief.

* * *

It took Jim a moment to get his bearings. His head was throbbing painfully, and he felt sick to his stomach. He dropped to his knees and pressed his face into his hands, focusing on breathing in and out, in and out, until the world stopped spinning around him and his innards were no longer trying to crawl up out of his throat. He groaned, spat a mouthful of phlegm onto the ground, then stood up and looked around.

It was obvious he wasn't on Osiris VI anymore. Osiris VI had been desolate and quiet, a world that existed mostly in the realm of dreams and memories. This world, however, was very much alive, although it was by no means healthy and thriving - the buildings around him were pocked with what looked like bullet holes, and the sky was a sickly shade of gray that spoke of frequent explosions throwing massive clouds of particles into the air. He could hear shouts and the occasional sharp crack of gunfire off in the distance, and even in his immediate surroundings he could make out the shapes of bodies huddled beneath piles of graying, worn-out rags. Dead or sleeping, he couldn't be sure. Swallowing hard, Jim started to make his way forward, sticking close to the grimy, brick and concrete walls. If there was one thing he'd figured out about this place, it was that he needed to be careful.

The hell of it was, this place seemed _familiar_. As he picked his way through the maze-like streets that were scarred with small craters and chunks of rubble, he couldn't help feeling that he'd walked this same route before, countless times, and that he was just trapped in some kind of weird delusion that kept him from realizing where he really was. Maybe he'd triggered some kind of alternate perception field when he'd touched that statue. Maybe his body was still back on Osiris VI, and Spock was trying to wake him up. Maybe -

He turned a corner and stopped dead, feeling like he'd just been punched right in the gut.

Of course he'd been here before. He'd jogged up Telegraph Hill at least once a week during his Academy Days, reassuring himself that if he could make it up to the top in reasonably good time he was still in decent shape; he'd even come here right after the Narada Incident, gone all the way up to the top of Coit Tower and looked out over San Francisco, staring at the Golden Gate Bridge and the dark blue waters of the Bay and marveling at how incredibly lucky they'd gotten. All of this had come within a hair's breadth of being destroyed forever - and in whatever alternate world he'd ended up in, apparently it had.

He stepped out onto the small plaza surrounding Coit Tower and stared up at it. It was still standing, at least, even if the surrounding neighborhood had seen decidedly better days. It was showing signs of wear and tear, though, its walls covered with poorly drawn graffiti and marked with streaks of soot and grime. Jim reached out and touched the concrete: it was solid. Unlikely that this was a dream, then.

But what could have _happened_ \- ?

"Good God, man, what in the nine hells do you think you're doing out in the open?!?"

Jim turned around. A man was standing at the edge of the plaza and glaring fiercely at him, his thick dark eyebrows drawn together in an impressive scowl. He was dressed in plain, serviceable clothes that had clearly been mended many times, and had a canvas knapsack slung over his shoulder. He couldn't have been _that_ much older than Jim, but he looked very, very tired, and hungry as well, and his hazel eyes had a callous, cynical look to them.

What took Jim's breath away, though, was the sudden shock of recognition flooding through his veins. All he could do was stand there and stare. He'd never seen this man before; he was sure of that, and yet when Jim looked at him he had the overwhelming sensation that he _knew_ this stranger, only he'd somehow forgotten how...

The other man was saying something, and Jim forced himself back to the here and now. "What?" he asked, feeling off balance and unsure of himself.

The stranger rolled his eyes. "I _said_ , walking around in the open up here is asking to get shot. What kind of an idiot hasn't figured that out by now?" He beckoned at Jim. "C'mon then, idiot, get over here unless you want your life to end sooner than you were expecting."

Jim hurried over, and his new companion wasted no time in turning around and leading the way back through the tangled streets of Telegraph Hill. Jim couldn't help but feel sick at the devastation he saw all around him. The San Francisco he knew was a vibrant, living city, and this place was little more than a wreck. It was wrong, terribly wrong, and with every step they took Jim felt more and more lost and disoriented.

"-lucky for you there was a drop scheduled for today or you'd've been picked off for sure. Honestly, you'd think you weren't from around here only you have to be, no one ever visits San Fran -"

Jim finally stopped in his tracks and waited. It took a second for the stranger to turn around and glare back at him, irritation written clearly across his features.

"Do you _want_ to get shot? Is that it? We have to keep moving. There's only a few hours of daylight left, and we need to be inside well before then."

Jim didn't move. "Who are you?"

"Leonard McCoy, and I don't have time for this." The scowl was back and as impressive as ever. "This is what I get for trying to help the lost sheep wandering around the city."

"And what is this place?"

Leonard laughed, astonished and bitter. "You hit your head or something? It's San Francisco, moron, but you can call it hell if you want to."

Jim was starting to feel just as sick as he had when he first came to, with his gut churning and his mouth dry. "And the year?"

One eyebrow climbed up into the dark fringe of Leonard's bangs. "2051."

And in that moment, Jim felt the world drop out from beneath him.

  
**Beginnings**   


**San Francisco - March 2051**

Spring in San Francisco had been chilly enough back when Jim had been a cadet living in the Starfleet Academy dorms and had had any number of bed partners to curl up under the covers with and press his icy toes against. Spring in this bombed out, war-torn San Francisco, however, was almost unbearable. No matter how tightly he curled in on himself in an attempt to conserve heat, he could not for the life of him stay warm. He shivered and shivered until he finally managed to fall asleep, and even then it was more like a restless doze filled with strange, unsettling dreams than anything deep and restorative. It felt as though no time had passed at all before someone was shaking him awake, rough and insistent.

"Jim. Wake up. Jim."

Jim blinked blearily up at Leonard and sat up slowly, rubbing his arms in an attempt to ward off the cold, pre-dawn air. His head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and his thoughts were sluggish and confused. Ever since he'd landed here, there'd been a part of him that hoped he'd just wake up back in the Captain's quarters on the _Enterprise_ , but with each passing day that became more and more of a pipe dream. It looked like he was here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future.

That was one thought Jim didn't care to examine too closely.

"Time to get up?" he asked, voice scratchy, and he coughed deeply in an attempt to clear his chest.

"Yeah. Kenichi took off about an hour ago to see if they can find anything to salvage, and I'm heading down to the Wharf to see if anyone down there needs some help. Figured you might as well come along." Leonard's face darkened. "Medical care was bad enough even before people decided to get trigger happy with nukes, and now it's a damn miracle people make it past their thirteenth birthdays." He turned away and started to shove supplies into his knapsack, muttering irritably under his breath.

Jim pushed back the thin covers and scrambled to his feet, wasting no time in pulling on the drab cargo pants and thick sweatshirt emblazoned with a peeling University of Mississippi logo that Leonard had given him. They smelled more than a little rank, and didn't fit all that well since Leonard was both taller and broader in the shoulders than Jim, but water was too precious to waste on something like laundry (or bathing, for that matter, and Jim hadn't realized just how much he appreciated being clean until he ended up here), and the main thing was that they were sturdy and warm. They were also discreet - Jim's Starfleet uniform was made from sophisticated fabric that regulated temperature and was highly resilient, but it also turned him into an obvious target. So hand-me-downs it was.

It'd been eight days since he'd found himself here, and Jim was slowly starting to acclimate. So far he'd spent most of his time huddled in the gloom of the tiny, ramshackle hut that served as the group's safehouse, spinning the story of how he was originally from Iowa, but had a gap in his memory following the death of his parents. It was surprisingly easy to paint himself as an amnesiac - his words might've sounded hollow and pathetic to his own ears, but no one pushed him on it. Everyone had things that they wanted to forget, and there were more than a few people wondering around with blank stares and no words. As far as Leonard was concerned, Jim was just another lost soul whose life had been ruined by war. It was an easy enough part of play. All he needed to focus on was getting back to when he belonged.

Leonard shouldered his pack and glanced at Jim. "You ready?"

Jim nodded. "Yeah."

They were silent as they made their way through San Francisco's ugly, war-torn streets. Jim couldn't help comparing the devastation around him with the lively city he remembered from his own time, and felt as though he were hanging onto his sanity by the thinnest of margins. He'd learned about World War III in the history books, of course, but it was one thing to read about the environmental damage caused by multiple nuclear detonations, and quite another to actually live it. There hadn't been a single sunny day since his arrival, and the almost constant rainfall left filthy gray streaks on everything it touched. The city looked like it was coated in a thick layer of ash, and almost nothing grew. The already bleak atmosphere was made worse by the social and economic unrest that had plagued all of California throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, trends that were only intensified by the ranging global conflict. Even before the first nukes were fired, it had been divided into a series of districts, separate havens for the have and have-nots - and there were far more of the latter than the former. Now, with resources scarcer than ever, the majority of the city was a essentially a massive slum ruled through force of arms. Whichever of the city's factions had the most firepower had the most respect, and shoot-outs were a daily occurrence. Anyone foolish enough to wander about in plain sight - like Jim had, that first day - was more than likely to suffer serious injury. The need to avoid being a target forced him and Leonard to move through the streets in a semi-crouch, darting from concealed doorway to concealed doorway, taking hours to traverse a distance that Jim had once been able to walk in about thirty minutes.

San Francisco had been his city, once. He'd grown up among the endless cornfields and small towns of the Midwest, and San Francisco had been a revelation for him. He'd fallen in love with it in practically no time, and spent almost as much time exploring its myriad streets and neighborhoods as he had in class. His memories of San Francisco were colorful and joyful, but this place...this place was a city of hopelessness, and even though Jim knew that it would have its Renaissance, it was hard to keep believing that. It just seemed so very impossible.

"Focus, Jim," muttered Leonard, scowling at him. "There've been at least two street gangs patrolling this area, and if your head's not in the game you'll call attention to us."

Jim sucked in a deep breath and nodded curtly. Leonard was right. He needed to stop seeing ghosts.

This San Francisco wasn't Jim's city, but it was Leonard's. Jim had managed to learn a lot about Leonard in the past few days. Leonard, for all his gruff sarcasm and prickly exterior, was an honest-to-God altruist who was driven by the need to do what he could to help ease the suffering of a devastated world. He'd gotten his medical training back in Georgia, one of the quiet corners of the world that had fared reasonably well up until radioactive fallout had poisoned the earth, leaving thousands of people hungry and sick. Jim didn't know the exact details, but he'd gathered that Leonard had lost his family back there, and that was what had driven him to leave. He'd told Jim that no one would willingly _come_ to San Francisco, but that was exactly what Leonard did: made his way across the country to one of the few cities still standing, because that was where he felt he could do the most good. Jim admired him for his determination and compassion, for the way he gave freely of his skills when there was no chance of repayment, and for how he didn't shy away from even the ugliest wounds and illnesses.

He would've made one hell of a CMO.

And that was the thing. Jim could picture Leonard serving on the _Enterprise_ so easily it was almost disconcerting. Leonard would fit right in with the staff there, take the lead in a way that M'Benga, for all his brilliance in research, was just a bit too reticent to. Leonard would stay cool in a crisis, and deal with crying ensigns and selfish senior officers in the same down-to-earth, no-nonsense way. Not to mention, thought Jim, feeling just a bit guilty, he'd look _good_ that Starfleet uniform.

There was also that deep sense of connection he felt with Leonard. He'd thought the surge of recognition he'd felt the first time he saw the man was some sort of fluke, but it hadn't gone away. If anything, it had gotten stronger - just one week and there were times that they could almost finish each others' sentences. He was certain that the two of them could have the sort of deep, instinctive relationship that he was supposed to have with Spock, only with Spock it seemed that no matter how hard they tried, how close they got, there was always something missing.

Jim wanted to ask Leonard if he felt the same way, but for all that he was usually so charming and loquacious, he couldn't think of a single way to broach the subject. He kept silent as they made their way to the Wharf, keeping his eyes fixed on Leonard's broad back as they crept through the streets. He paused just once, briefly, when a few weak beams of sunlight filtered down through the ever-present cloud cover to sparkle off the waters of the bay. It was a rare moment of beauty, and seeing it made his heart ache and his breath catch in his throat. Leonard stopped as well, his expression conveying sorrow and regret.

"Makes you sick, doesn't it?" he said softly. "That we could do this to our own planet. Time was that you could see sunlight on the Bay more days than not." He shook his head, lip curling upward in disgust. "And those people over there -" he gestured toward the Presidio "- they just sit in their fortified mansions and don't do anything to help everyone who's suffering out here. Shows you what humanity's really like, doesn't it?"

Jim looked down at the open expanse of land that would one day be the site of Starfleet Academy. It was the only part of San Francisco that wasn't a complete mess, with its borders fenced off and patrolled by armed guards, and a small airfield to allow supplies to be flown in: an oasis of safety in the midst of a wasteland. Jim scowled. There were several constants in history, and one of them was that the wealthy elites would always find a way to isolate themselves from the horrors that the less fortunate had to contend with on a daily basis.

"I'd bet a kidney that they've got massive stockpiles of medical supplies in there," muttered Leonard. "Probably only use a fraction of it, but they're too damn selfish to distribute the rest. Because, you know, they might need it later on." He turned away, his shoulders slumping just a little. "Bastards."

Jim couldn't help it; he reached out and rested his hand on Leonard's arm. "Leonard," he said, and stopped, trying to find the right words.

Leonard looked back at him, eyebrow raised. "Yeah, Jim?"

Jim swallowed hard. "One day, this is all going to be different," he blurted out. "It's going to get better. The universe is really big, you know? And once humans realize just what's out there, they're going to come together as a planet, and..." He trailed off when he caught sight of the amused smile on Leonard's face. "What is it?"

"You." Leonard laughed, just a little. "You must've been through a hell of a lot, kid, to make you lose your memory like that, but you've still managed to hold on to an optimistic streak." He reached up and patted Jim's cheek. "Try not to lose that. I have to say, though, that it'll be a damned miracle if you don't."

"Yeah." Jim smiled back. "Yeah, I'll try. And maybe I'll prove you wrong."

The sun vanished back behind the clouds, and the moment was lost.

 **USS Enterprise - Stardate 2261.126**

Acting Captain Spock of the USS _Enterprise_ was at a loss.

He did not care for this state of affairs. He appreciated puzzles, of course - a significant portion of early education among Vulcans consisted of applying logic to work out appropriate solutions to a variety of conundrums - but this particular situation was becoming a source of unseemly frustration. He told himself this was because the lack of data was an irritant. On some level, however, he knew that the source of his discontent was his concern for the Captain - for Jim.

 _Jim_.

Spock remembered the way Jim looked in the quiet dimness of their quarters when they were finally off shift, his blue eyes smiling as he teased Spock, telling him to _let go a bit, it's just you and me here_. The way Jim's muscles felt when they shifted beneath smooth skin, or the way he gasped when Spock ran his fingers across his thigh -

No. No, he could not think like this. He took a deep breath, held it, exhaled. Forced all thoughts of Jim as anything other than his Captain to the farthest reaches of his consciousness, and focused on the task at hand.

The temple complex had clearly been deserted for years; the rest of the planet equally uninhabited. The only life forms they had come across were the small, unremarkable reptiles, and those hardly constituted a threat. The Captain's abrupt disappearance was a complete mystery, and that was...troubling. The Captain had not sounded distressed or alarmed before his abduction; he had simply sounded excited and intrigued by the thrill of discovery. It had not been a violent occurrence, and the Captain had probably not been in any pain. It had been a simple case of here one moment, gone the next. Except, of course, that it was not simple at all.

Spock flipped through the data captures of the Osiris temple for the forty-third time, looking for anything that might provide a clue. It was all the same, however - the wide open space of the empty vestibule, the stone pillars reaching up toward the heavens, the interlocking rings and crescents carved into the walls that seemed to be the inhabitants' writing system, and the statue of the angel. There were no clues whatsoever.

It was not _logical_.

More than that, the entire ship had been adversely affected by this unwelcome turn of events. It was not just the underlying anxiety present on every crew member's face - they were used to seeing Jim come back from missions bloody and bruised, but for him to be gone was a different matter entirely - even the ship herself seemed altered, somehow. And while Spock understood that the _Enterprise_ was a starship, and therefore incapable of feeling emotions such as grief, he could not shake the feeling that she was running slower than usual and that the constant thrum of her engines had taken on a mournful note.

"Captain."

He looked up from his computer terminal to see Lieutenant Uhura standing before him, not a single strand of long dark hair out of place and her expression carefully blank. As always, Spock was unable to prevent a faint feeling of regret from flickering through his heart whenever he saw her. The two of them had been good, once. He had thought that, perhaps, they might...

He let that thought go, as it was not helpful to either of them, and nodded in greeting. "Lieutenant. How may I be of assistance?"

"Captain," she said again, and Spock could not help but feel that hearing himself addressed in that fashion was so very, very wrong, "Captain, with all due respect you need to rest. You've been at this for three days. Vulcan stamina or no, it's not healthy."

"Your concern is appreciated, but I assure you that I am aware of my limits."

"Are you?" she asked softly, her professional mask slipping for just a second. Then the moment was gone and her voice was brisk and no-nonsense. "You are the Acting Captain of the USS _Enterprise_. You need to set an example. Pushing yourself to the point of collapse is not what this crew needs to see at the moment..." She stopped, sighed, and tried again.

"Spock, _please_. You need to rest. No matter what's happened between us, I hate seeing you like this."

There it was again, that twinge of regret.

They gazed at each other in silence for a moment before Spock nodded in acquiescence and rose to his feet. He would let himself sleep for a few hours. The unconscious mind could often come to conclusions that the conscious mind, too distracted by the constant barrage of outside stimuli, could not. Perhaps he would have some new insight when he woke.

Four hours later, when he opened his eyes to the dim glow of starlight, all he could remember was that he had dreamed of angels.

 **San Francisco - March 2051**

If the Presidio was the most hospitable district in San Francisco, a secret paradise where there was fresh water and enough food, Fisherman's Wharf was the least. The infrastructure wasn't totally gone - the city got electricity for maybe a total of two days out of the week, the internet still worked in occasional bursts, and the United States government still attempted to deliver food and other supplies - but the slender resources there were didn't trickle down to everyone. It hadn't taken long for a cartel to seize control of the supplies that were shipped in to the cities and distribute them based on who could pay what, and the government had too much of a mess on its hands to bother with trying to regulate the process. So it stayed unfair - the rich got the best of things, everyone else scrounged for castoffs and leftovers.

The Wharf had been in decline for years, its status as little more than a tourist trap selling overpriced, cheap souvenirs making it especially vulnerable to economic trouble. Now it was where the desperate converged: children who were far too thin and dressed in ragged clothes that couldn't possibly keep them warm, young people with hollow eyes who were out to score whatever kind of drugs could make them forget the world for just a little while, and old men and women who just looked tired, so tired, all huddled around tiny heaters and waited for another day to end. Seeing the all-encompassing hopelessness made Jim feel sick, and he wished that there was something he could do to change - transport all these people to the future, maybe, or bring replicator technology back here, or...

But as he watched Leonard, Jim realized that he didn't need to do anything large or dramatic to make a difference to these people. Leonard gave all of them an equal share of his attention, doing what he could with his limited supply of medicines and bandages; and the people listened to him when he laid his hands on them, his gentle touch completely at odds with his gruff demeanor. He was doubtless one of the few people who gave any indication that he cared about what happened to these poor bastards, and they responded with so much gratitude it almost hurt to see it.

Jim didn't know a damn thing about twenty-first century medicine, but there was something he could do. Back on the _Enterprise_ he hadn't had many occasions to put his mechanical skills to use, but now he had good reason to be grateful for growing up in a remote Iowa town where twenty-first century machines still got some use. He knew how to get the generators working, how to get an engine to run on vegetable fuel, and how to leech off of a wireless connection. While Leonard worked with the sick, Jim gathered a group of the able-bodied and set to work seeing what could be done to make things maybe just a little better. There were only a few of them, but they were enthusiastic, and by the time he and Leonard needed to head back to the safehouse, Jim had managed to form a pretty good rapport with the group.

"They're good people," he said to Leonard as they made their way slowly through the streets. "It's just that they have no purpose. No one cares about them one way or the other, so they don't even try to change things for themselves."

Leonard snorted. "No shit. Don't know what can be done, though - I try to do what I can, but it's not enough." He looked down, his face tense and unhappy. "It's never enough."

"They listen to you," Jim pointed out. "And some of them were more than happy to be working on something that's actually useful. It gives them back some measure of control, and they like having that. You know, if everyone could just start working together -"

"Stop being such an idealist." Bones turned his back on Jim and started to walk faster. "Just look at the New United Nations. It's a joke. No one pays any attention to it. The way the world is now, it's everyone for himself. That ain't gonna change in either of our lifetimes."

"But it doesn't _have_ to be that way!" insisted Jim. "You know what they say, about a pebble being able to divert the course of an entire river if it's just in the right place? Well, it's true. Look at Martin Luther, or Rosa Parks, or Zefram Cochrane -"

Leonard stopped and turned around, staring blankly at him. "Wait, _who_?"

Right. That historic flight was still twelve years away. Jim backtracked. "The point is that nothing will ever change if you don't even try. You have to be willing to believe in something, and really want to make it happen. You need to be able to make a move one way or the other. That's how things happen."

Leonard just shook his head, muttered, "whatever," and started walking again. Jim sighed and hurried to catch up.

It was 2051. In two years, the most influential world leaders would meet here, in this city, and negotiate a cease-fire to finally end the global conflict and provide enough stability for recovery to begin. Ten years after that, they would make first contact with the Vulcans, and humanity would run forward in leaps and bounds. But two years was a very, very long time in desperate circumstances, and the knowledge that the future was going to be more amazing than these people could possibly imagine was small comfort when set against the devastation and misery of now.

Jim didn't know how was getting home. He didn't even know how he'd gotten here to begin with - it hadn't been a wormhole, or some kind of experimental weapon. He'd literally just blinked and found himself here. That wasn't a lot of data to go on, which made it practically impossible to figure out how he was supposed to reverse the process. But while he was here, he damn well wasn't going to sit on his ass moping. He'd find some way to do what he could to help these people, no matter how small, and he'd get Leonard on board while he was at it.

Jim frowned at the other man's back. For all his outward cynicism, the doctor had a good heart. If he didn't, he wouldn't bother risking his life going to some of San Francisco's worst districts in order to give the people what help he could. He wanted things to be different, and he _had_ to believe that they could be; otherwise, what was the point?

  
**Quickening**   


**San Francisco - July 2051**

The growing season was short and the yields were small, but that didn't stop people from planting gardens wherever they could. Jim supposed that they were driven by the need to see something green and alive as proof that the world hadn't gone completely to shit, not yet, and that there might still be reason to keep going. He knew from personal experience how intimately the fertility of the land was tied to human hope. Tarsus IV hadn't been a disaster from the beginning, after all - when he'd first arrived, the land had been a patchwork of rich dark soil covered by a soft green haze of young crop shoots, and the settlers had been full of optimistic energy. It was only later on, when the golden heads of grain had started to turn black and it was difficult to breathe through the smell of rot, that people had stopped singing and laughing.

His aunt had kept a small vegetable garden out in back of their small, prefabricated house. During the good days she'd loved to be outside grubbing around in the dirt, and every night for dinner they'd devoured salads so fresh you could almost taste sunshine and rain when you bit into them. After the crops started failing she'd still spend hours tending to her plants, but it was no longer a source of joy for her. Jim remembered how she'd wept when the last of her tomatoes withered and died, her own hopes and dreams dead along with the earth itself, and she hadn't even protested when the troops came to take them away from their land. All the fight had gone out of her.

Jim couldn't help but think of Aunt Elaine as he watched Kenichi Sulu inspect each individual plant for any signs of bugs or rot, his fingers brushing against stems and leaves with the most careful of touches. The tiny plot of dirt right next to the safehouse wasn't much to look at, but Kenichi dedicated himself to it with almost feverish intensity, carefully measuring out small doses of nutrients to add to the soil, rationing enough water for the seedlings, even crooning softly over the first shoots. All that effort seemed to have paid off, however, as the twelve daikon plants were now ready to be dug up.

"Have you thought about using containers?" asked Jim as he tugged gently at one leafy top. "That way you could control growing conditions at least a bit better and you wouldn't have to worry about people stealing your plants." He sat back on his heels and gestured to the sharp pieces of broken glass cemented to the top of the brick wall that surrounded their meager space.

Kenichi shook his head. "I could, but it wouldn't be the same. I like seeing things coming up out of the ground. Lets me know that there's still some life in this planet, you know?"

"Yeah." Jim smiled wistfully. "Yeah, I know. My aunt would say the same the same thing."

Kenichi pulled up another daikon and brushed away the larger clumps of dirt clinging to its pale surface. "Is she still in Iowa?"

"No." Jim's mouth twisted into a grimace. "No, she died years ago. Got killed."

"Sorry," said Kenichi, and Jim could hear real sympathy in his voice. Kenichi was a San Francisco native whose parents had been victims of a particularly violent outbreak of civil unrest back in 2044, leaving him all alone in the world at age seventeen. He was smart, though, and spent the next five years working the streets, learning the rhythm of the black markets, and brushing up on his fighting skills. It had been a rough life, and the man Jim had met three months ago was by turns wary and cynical, angry and taciturn. Underneath that, however was an unshakable sense of justice and a firm belief that the world could be better than what it was. Whenever Jim looked at him, he couldn't help but think of his great-great-grandson, of how Hikaru was probably the way Kenichi would be if he hadn't watched his parents die and been left to fend for himself in a harsh, uncaring world, and felt his chest grow tight. There were diamonds buried in the ashes of this world, and all of them deserved so much more than what life had given them. It was nothing but a massive coin toss that had landed them here instead of some other time where they could have ventured as far as their imaginations could take them. It wasn't fair.

Then again, thought Jim, the world needed people like Kenichi Sulu and Leonard McCoy now more than ever, needed their genius and determination if it was going to make it to the next stage of events.

"So," said Kenichi after a minute, squinting up at him with a teasing half-smile hovering on his lips, "you have anyone else out there waiting for you? You're pretty easy on the eyes, you know. It wouldn't surprise me if someone was looking for you."

Jim laughed. "Not exactly." There was no one waiting for him here, in this time. Back in the 23rd century, though, Spock was no doubt looking for him. Spock loved puzzles; trying to figure out what had happened to Jim would probably keep him entertained for days on end.

Spock. Jim frowned, just a bit. Spock would be searching for him as a loyal First Officer. But as anything more...?

It was hard to say if what they had could be classified as love, or whether it was just need, both of them trying to smooth away their loneliness and confusion with each other.

"Not exactly," he said again, his voice soft, and Kenichi didn't ask again.

"Right, that's all of them," said Kenichi about ten minutes later, clambering to his feet with a smile. "Just think, we'll have real food tonight. That'll be a nice change, yeah?"

Jim stared down at the dozen skinny, rather pathetic looking daikon radishes that Kenichi had poured his heart and soul into cultivating and felt his heart twist. He remembered going to the Alemany Farmer's Market on Saturday mornings and seeing an abundance of food laid out for purchase - tubs full of freshly picked lettuce, crates of ripe peaches whose delicious scent hovered in the air, jars of local honey, glowing red raspberries... a banquet of food, glorious food, and in this time a few stunted daikons were a rare treat to be savored.

"Yeah." Jim swallowed hard. "Yeah, that'll be good."

Kenichi reached out and clapped Jim firmly on the back. "C'mon, show some enthusiasm. The little things are what keep us going, you know?"

"I know," said Jim, and offered a tentative smile. He doubted it reached his eyes, but it seemed to satisfy Kenichi, who nodded in satisfaction and turned around to head back inside. Jim hesitated for a moment before following him, his eyes drawn inexorably to the small patch of dirt and all it represented, once again feeling a wave of helpless and the need to do so much more for these people.

But when he saw the way Leonard's face crinkled up in a rare smile and heard him declare that it was "so good to be eating something that's not from a goddamn vacupack," he realized Kenichi was right: it really was the little things.

* * *

Hours later, in deepest part of the night, Jim couldn't sleep. He could hear Kenichi's deep, even breathing from across the room and the sound of Leonard thrashing beneath his blanket, probably lost in a tangle of bad dreams. Jim lay awake for a while, listening to the sounds of the other man's nightmare, before finally crawling out of bed and padding over to Leonard's side.

It was so dark that he could barely make out the shape of Leonard's body. Jim reached out carefully, his fingers running over the rough texture of the blanket before brushing against warm skin, and he held his breath as Leonard muttered in response. He didn't wake up, though, and after a moment Jim started to stroke his hair, slow and gentle. He felt a brief pang of guilt as he thought of Spock - _and really, he'd barely thought of Spock in any context other than First Officer and friend since he'd met Leonard_ \- then pushed it away. Spock wasn't here. And this felt _right_.

"Hey," he whispered, his voice so soft that it was barely audible in the deep stillness. "Hey. It's okay. All of this is going to get better one day; I promise. Just hang in there. It won't be like this forever."

After a moment Leonard sighed and went still, drifting off into a deeper, untroubled sleep.

Jim let his hands rest against Leonard's head for a minute before getting to his feet and moving quietly to the staircase that led up from the basement where they slept, skipping the fifth stair that squeaked whenever anyone stepped on it. The sound of the tumblers sliding back was loud in the heavy silence of the night, and Jim waited to hear if anyone had woken up - all of them slept so lightly, ready to leap into action if there were any indication of a threat - but no, there was no sign of anyone stirring down below. Jim pushed the door open and stepped outside, sighing in relief as he felt the wind on his face. He was so used to being able to look out of the Enterprise's windows and see the vastness of space laid out before him that being forced to spend so much time on indoors made him feel as if he were suffocating. He knew the reasons why they needed to be so careful, of course, but that didn't make the reality any easier to bear. He was a creature of the stars; being stuck here on the ground didn't suit him.

It wasn't hard to clamber up onto the beat up rain barrel they kept on the side of the house and then get up onto the roof. The tar shingles were still faintly warm, and it was nice to stretch out on them. Jim sighed and closed his eyes, content to let himself drift for a minute.

The night was not quiet. Instead it was full of the sound of running feet, angry shouts, and the occasional burst of gunfire. It wasn't close enough to be an immediate threat - they'd gotten lucky in their location; Russian Hill was fairly quiet thanks to the presence of numerous black market moguls that Kenichi had connections to - but it was still a reminder that this world was terra incognita. Guns weren't entirely obsolete in the twenty-third century - Grandpa Tiberius himself had kept an old shotgun for scaring off the coyotes - but the handguns and semi-automatics, those weapons that were designed solely to do as much damage to another human being as possible, were few and far between. To be in such close proximity to them all the time was unnerving, to say the least. Kirk was no stranger to violence, and never hesitated to lift his phaser to defend someone who needed help, but there was something about the sharp rattle of a machine gun, or the crack of a rifle, that set his teeth on edge. It was more savage than what he was used to. More _primeval_.

He sighed and opened his eyes, ready to go back inside, but then froze, lips parted in awe as he took in the sky above.

He'd only had fleeting glimpses of the night sky since arriving here. The amount of particles that had been thrown into the atmosphere over the course of the war meant that clear days and nights were a rarity; more often than not the sky was overcast and dull. Now, though, there was a break in the clouds, and he could see stars sparkling far overhead. After missing them for so long, they were achingly beautiful, and Jim wished that he spread his arms and fly up to them.

"You should get back inside."

Jim sat up and looked over his shoulder, grinning as he saw the dark outline of Leonard's shape. "I like feeling the wind on my face. It gets too claustrophobic down below."

"It's also _safe_."

Jim laughed softly. "Sometimes the payoff's worth the risk." He pointed up at the night sky. "Look. You can actually see the stars tonight."

Leonard hesitated a bit longer, then sighed and sat down next to Jim, drawing his knees up to his chest and tilting his face upward. "We saw a lot more stars back in Georgia," he said after a moment. "I used to be afraid of them, you know. I was scared of what might be out there. At some point, though, I started to look toward them more and more." He snorted. "It was like I thought they had all the answers."

"Why were you scared of them?" asked Jim, curious. He'd always associated the stars with freedom and adventure, evidence that there was more to life than Iowa's endless cornfields and a farmhouse that always felt too small. It had never occurred to him to be _scared_ of them.

Leonard shrugged. "It has to do with when I was a kid," he said. "Something happened to me when I was about six. I can't remember it all that well, but it had something to do with the sky. The people who found me said it must have been one of the bombs going off, but it didn't feel like an explosion. It seemed more like a lightning storm, but what do I know?" He snorted disparagingly. "All I remember is that I got trapped in it, and it was like I was being pulled..." Leonard's voice trailed off, and Jim was sure he was frowning. "It came from the stars," he said finally. "That's all I'm sure of."

"Huh." Jim looked over at him, wishing he could see his face. "That would've been what, 2027 or something? Have you looked up any attacks that took place over Georgia around then?"

"Yeah." Leonard sighed heavily and leaned back on his elbows. "I looked, and there's nothing beyond the usual food riots in the big cities. There's no explanation. I have this memory of a storm in space that doesn't make sense and that apparently didn't happen." He was silent for a long time, and Jim didn't dare say anything that might disturb the other man's train of thought.

When Leonard spoke again, his voice was troubled. "The hell of it is, I can remember things from before the storm, you know? I remember sunny skies for days on end and eating as many peaches as I wanted, right from the tree. Everything felt so peaceful, not like it is here. Everything was _better_."

Jim moved a bit closer to him, so close that he could feel the heat from Leonard's body. All around them, the night seemed to be holding its breath, waiting to hear what Leonard would say next. Leonard was silent, however, and after a while he got to his feet and extended his hand to Jim.

"C'mon. Back inside."

Jim let himself be pulled up without protest and followed Leonard back into the close darkness of the house. He didn't fall back asleep, though. He lay awake for a long time listening to the soft rhythm of Leonard's breathing and trying to calm his whirling thoughts.

Leonard remembered something from his childhood that sounded almost eerily like the space-time disruption caused by the Narada's incursion. When they first met, Jim had felt an instinctive connection with him, like he'd found something he'd only just realized had been missing. There had to be a connection there; he was sure of it.

He just didn't know what it was.

 **San Francisco - January 2052**

It was almost unbearably cold.

And Jim _knew_ cold. He'd grown up in the middle of Iowa, where temperatures were regularly below zero and the wind blowing across the landscape cut straight to the bone. He'd been marooned on Delta Vega, a planet whose entire climate was more extreme than anything found on Earth, even at the poles. But he'd never had the sort of constant exposure to the elements that he had to deal with now in a mid-twenty-first San Francisco winter. He was used to being able to warm up fairly easily - at home a warm house was never far away, and on Delta Vega he'd been too busy running for his life to even _feel_ the cold - but here there was no way to escape from the constant chill. They could only run the generator for a few short hours each day, usually when they were heating up whatever combination of canned food was that day's meal. The rest of the time they had to grit their teeth and endure.

Jim curled up even tighter and reminded himself that he was a starship captain. He'd seen his share of harsh conditions, and always lived to tell the tale. He'd spent three days crawling through the jungle on C'ali, subsisted on insect larvae on Ramirion, and spent one memorable week in Dalmasca's royal prison. This should be a fucking cakewalk.

It was just...cold, and uncomfortable, and he was a long way from home without knowing if it was even possible to go back. He'd already been here for almost a year, and there hadn't been any sign that the _Enterprise_ was looking for him. Had they given up on him? Had there been a memorial service, like the one he'd been dragged to every year as a boy in honor of the _Kelvin_? Did they think Spock was a better captain than him...?

He sighed and turned over yet again. He was just starting to settle when he felt a large, warm hand come to rest on the blanket covering his shoulder, and his breath caught in his throat.

Leonard. They'd been dancing around each other _forever_ , ever since that night in July when they'd looked up at the stars, and maybe it was finally time for them do actually do something about that low-lying connection between them that refused to go away.

Neither of them spoke. Jim just lifted his blanket in invitation and Leonard crawled in behind him, curling protectively around Jim's smaller frame. Jim felt himself start to relax, soothed by the sound of Leonard's steady breathing and warm bulk, and finally drifted off to sleep.

He woke up smiling, and when Leonard leaned down to kiss him it felt like being home at last.

 **USS Enterprise - Stardate 2261.143**

In the end it was Uhura and Chekov who discovered what had happened to the Captain.

Three weeks after the incident on Osiris VI they were no closer to retrieving Jim. Starfleet Command was becoming restive, impatient for its flagship to return to its normal duties, and Spock could feel the pressure to make a decision on what to do. They had already devoted an unprecedented amount of time and resources to attempting to recover one man, and Spock was well aware that protocol said that Captain James Tiberius Kirk should now be considered missing in action. They could not search for him forever. The _Enterprise_ had other obligations it needed to fulfill.

Spock knew this; more than that, he knew it was _logical_ , and yet it was surprisingly difficult to begin composing the formal report. But begin he did. Spock sighed quietly to himself, then pressed his lips together, pushed all thoughts not related to his duties as First Officer to the back of his mind, and reached for the PADD.

He'd barely finished the first paragraph when his comm unit chimed. He frowned, somewhat annoyed that his concentration had been interrupted, and reached for it.

"This is Spock."

"Captain." Uhura's voice was tight and strained. "Your presence is required in the astrophysics lab immediately."

Spock's eyebrows raised just a bit. To his knowledge there were no experiments running. "Has there been an accident?"

There was a pause. "No," said Uhura. "But we think we found something. Just come."

The connection went silent. Spock stood, adjusted his shirt, and headed for the science wing.

When Spock arrived, Uhura and Chekov were staring intently at an enhanced image of the hieroglyphs from Osiris VI. There were a number of PADDs scattered around them, and they were so focused on whatever they were working on that it took them a moment to notice him.

Chekov looked up first. "Keptin," he said, and there was a mixture of trepidation and excitement in his voice. "Keptin, I believe we know what happened to -" he hesitated, momentarily abashed "- to the Keptin."

A sudden flood of warmth ran through Spock's veins, and he swallowed hard. "Explain."

"It's the angel." Uhura glanced at him briefly, then turned away. She would have noticed his momentary loss of composure when Chekov mentioned Jim. "I can't make out the finer points of these hieroglyphs, but I'm fairly sure that I've got a grasp of the large ideas." She tapped the screen, and a few crude carvings came into sharp focus. "Look here. These carvings are clearly portraying some kind of winged humanoid. It had to be symbolic of the winged statue."

Spock leaned forward and examined the image. There, in the middle of the line of hieroglyphs, was a crude carving that nevertheless managed to be evocative of the angels that dominated European cathedrals. Spock frowned.

"It is true that this particular statue is anomalous to its surroundings, but as to whether or not it bears responsibility for the Captain's -"

"Is more than just the writing." Chekov pulled up a graph displaying a variety of lines that veered sharply across the screen. "I noticed some wery interesting readings vhen I reexamined the data keptured by your tricorders." His fingers flickered over the display, bringing up a tangled mess of green, blue and red lines. "You see? Ze preliminary analysis is wery confusing, but when you strip away ze atmospheric interwention..." he tapped a few points on the X axis and the graph suddenly decreased to a single shimmering blue line, "...ze anomaly becomes wery clear."

Spock gazed at the line, frowning. "The anomaly?"

"Yes, Keptin." Chekov was almost bouncing with excitement as he always did when there were complicated theorems to be explained. "You see -" more flicks of his fingers, and the line turned into a three-dimensional model "- these readings indicate wery low-level fluctuations in both space and time. Is similar to the data recovered from the remnants of the USS _Kelvin_."

"Ah, I see." Now that he knew he was looking at it was obvious: beneath the standard atmospheric readings they'd picked up on Osiris VI was a sudden spike in temporal fluctuations. It was far less dramatic than what had been recorded during the _Narada_ 's incursion, and was only visible for a split second, but the base pattern was the same. Most importantly, the moment of the Captain's disappearance corresponded directly with that momentary glitch in time. That could hardly be mere coincidence.

"You conjecture that the Captain has been transported through time," said Spock, "and that this...statue was the means by which this feat was accomplished?"

"Yes." Uhura returned the display to the hieroglyphs. "See, here's the angel. It's not a benevolent creature, though. When you look closer -" with a flick of her fingers the display zoomed in, focusing on the creature's face "- you can see that its expression is more reminiscent of ghouls than heavenly beings. They natives were afraid of it. Or them."

Spock looked down at the image. It was crude, but still managed to convey an undeniable sense of malice. The gaping mouth was lined with sharp teeth, and the hands resembled nothing so much as predatory claws. It was disquieting, and Spock found that he did not want to look at it for long.

"Then the next step is for us to further analyze the statue in order to determine when the Captain has been sent," said Spock after a moment, and he was relieved that his voice revealed nothing of his momentary unease. He nodded at Uhura and Chekov. "I commend you for your hard work. Thank you."

He left before they had the chance to reply, his hands clutched tightly behind his back. He needed to spend some time meditating in order to clear his mind and order his thoughts. They would be unable to accomplish anything if they acted rashly, without fully considering the most effective course. There was still much they did not know, namely how the statue had managed to send the Captain through time, and they must be sure to move carefully against an entity that possessed such formidable powers.

Even knowing this, however, it took an unseemly amount of effort to stop himself from charging back to Osiris VI and simply demanding the Captain's - demanding _Jim_ 's - return.

* * *

The chronometer indicated that it was just past 0300 hours, deep in the middle of gamma shift, and Lieutenant Evans was alone in the astrophysics lab running a series of complicated simulations involving space/time disruptions and how they might be tracked. Evans had been there when the Captain vanished, and now he wanted to do his part in ensuring the man's safe return - he'd always liked the Captain; Kirk wasn't someone to sit back and use lesser-ranking officers as shields and had always made a point of being able to greet everyone by name. Evans respected that. He thought Kirk was exactly what a starship Captain should be: brilliant and brave but not unapproachable. The _Enterprise_ just wasn't the same without him.

Acting Captain Spock wanted them to wait. He said that they needed to go back to the surface and run further diagnostic tests on the stone angel, make sure they understood what they were dealing with. Evans thoughts on that particular approach could be summed up quite nicely with two little words: fuck that.

The computer beeped softly, and Evans put his PADD down to see what it had come up with this time. He'd been reexamining the footage from the temple, trying to find anything that Chekov and Uhura might have overlooked. So far, there was nothing - the situation was just as frustratingly vague as ever. Evans sighed and leaned closer to the main computer terminal. There was the anomaly's base code - good, they needed that - but it still faded out after the ten year mark. The Captain remained out of reach.

Great. Just great.

Evans stood up, stretched, and went to work reconfiguring the simulation parameters, rewriting equations here and adjusting external factors there. Within minutes he was so involved in his work that everything else faded into the background.

Which meant, of course, that he failed to notice the change on his PADD. When he set it down, the screen had been displaying the image of the angel statue with its back turned and its hands covering its eyes in a semblance of grief. When his back was turned, however, the statue changed. Its hands came down to reveal its face, and it moved closer and closer to the frame until its face filled the screen. Lieutenant Evans did not see the angel move into the lab itself, its image flickering but there, claws extended, mouth bared in a feral snarl, coming closer and closer...

In the blink of an eye, Lieutenant Evans was gone.

 **San Francisco - June 2052**

"Darlin'."

Jim groaned in irritation and rolled over onto his side, trying to get away from the fingers that were tickling at the sensitive skin of his ribcage. "'S too early," he slurred, and buried his face in the pillow.

His only reply was a snort of laughter, and then he was being tickled in earnest. Jim squeaked in protest and tried to get away, but Leonard was bigger than he was, and before long Jim was reduced to a pile of helpless giggling.

"Say, 'Uncle!'" growled Len, his breath hot against Jim's ear, hands warm on Jim's skin.

"Make me!" Jim bucked his hips, thrusting up against Leonard's groin, and grinned when he heard Leonard's breath stutter. He rolled over and drew Leonard into a kiss, sweet and slow, and before long their impromptu game was abandoned in favor of a lazy early-morning make out session.

"You know where Kenichi is?" murmured Leonard as he nipped and kissed at Jim's neck, hand sliding down to cup the curve of his ass.

"Must've gone out early...ah!" Jim bit his lip as Leonard hit the exact spot that never failed to make Jim's back arch and his toes curl. He swallowed hard. "Last night...last night he said something about going down to the Wharf?" He sucked in a deep breath and dug his fingers into Leonard's back. "There's some empty land there he wants to convert into gardens? Or something?" His voice came out in an embarrassing squeak as Leonard shifted, his fingers pulling down Jim's sweatpants until he could press kisses into the sensitive skin of Jim's navel.

"That's good," said Leonard softly, lifting his head so that he could fix Jim with an intense stare. "Because I'd hate for him to be walkin' in on us."

Jim groaned deep in his throat as Leonard finally, finally bent his head and wrapped his lips around Jim's erection. Jim pressed his head back against the threadbare pillow and keened, thrusting his hips up into that tight, wet heat. It was remarkable, really. The two of them had met just over a year ago, and look at them now - living in each others' pockets, practically, their connection much more natural than what he'd managed to achieve with Spock even after three times as long. Jim had never been one to put much stock in fate, had always held a deep-seated disdain for the concept, but he couldn't shake the feeling that he and Leonard were simply meant to be.

His mind drifted away for just a moment, remembering what Leonard had told him that summer night. A lightning storm in space had taken him away from a world that was safe and at peace, where he could eat as many peaches as he pleased, and taken him _here_. It was too much of a coincidence to be ignored. The Narada's incursion into the timeline had been a major event, the like of which had never been seen before, and wasn't it possible that it had sent shockwaves throughout the temporal sphere...?

Teeth nipped sharply at the tender skin of his inner thigh. "Ouch!" He blinked down at Leonard, who raised a sardonic eyebrow.

"You weren't payin' attention," drawled Leonard, his accent as thick and syrupy as the juice of a sun-warmed Georgia peach, "and darlin', just so you know, when you're with me, you're with _me_."

Jim laughed, a little breathlessly, then moaned helplessly as Leonard went back to lavishing attention on his cock. Jim was more than happy to abandon himself to the pleasure of it, letting his mind go blank as his body spiraled higher and higher until he finally came with a sharp cry. He relaxed back against the mattress in the aftermath and sighed happily as Leonard started to press gentle kisses against his skin. It was nice, really nice, and might have been happy to just stay like this for a while.

He wasn't a selfish lover, however, and before too much time had passed he reached for Leonard, eager to return the favor. He'd learned what Leonard liked over the past several months. Leonard liked it slow and sweet, liked it when Jim stroked Leonard's cock in time with the kisses he pressed against eager lips, and Jim was more than happy to indulge him. It wasn't too long before Leonard spilled over Jim's hand, his body shuddering and his breath coming in short pants against Jim's neck. Jim smiled and raised his his fingers to his lips, licking away Leonard's come. Bitter, with salty undertones, but not unpleasant.

"Plenty more where that came from," muttered Leonard and laughed, soft and low.

"Mmmm." Jim smiled and pressed his face into the juncture of Leonard's neck and shoulder, inhaling deeply. It was one of those small miracles, how Leonard always smelled good, like sunshine and freshly mowed hay. He figured he could happily wake up to this every day for the rest of his life.

And wasn't that a thought.

"Hey." Leonard ran his hand up and down Jim's arm. "Hey. Not that I wouldn't love to just stay here, but we should head out. Have a full day ahead of us."

"Mmmmmhmm." Jim made no attempt to get out of bed, just tossed one of his legs over Leonard's. "In a minute."

"Lazybones."

"You know it."

They lounged for just a few minutes longer before finally giving in to the inevitable, untangling limbs and grabbing at pieces of clothing as they prepared to face the day. Jim had never been one to laze endlessly in bed - and even if he had been, taking extra courses at the Academy would have quickly cured him of it - but he had to admit that he would have been happy to spend more time just like this, safe and warm under the covers with Leonard. There was nothing for it, however. This was a post-apocalyptic world. There was no time to lounge around doing nothing, at least not for long.

When they emerged from the safehouse the sky was cloudy and the air was cool, making Jim grateful for the bulky sweatshirt he was wearing. It was one of Leonard's, of course, just another one of the ways that the other man looked out for him. Leonard always made sure that Jim didn't get too lost in a world that was still strange to him, and something in Jim's chest ached at the thought that they weren't wandering through his San Francisco, a city defined by both the possibilities of the future and the most romantic aspects of the past. It would be nice to just go for a stroll on an early summer day without having to worry about stray bullets or trespassing on gang territory.

Maybe someday they'd be able to.

Leonard glanced over at him as if he could sense what Jim was thinking and reached out to twine their fingers together. Jim looked back and smiled, squeezing Leonard's fingers firmly before turning his attention back to navigating the maze of streets.

The thing was, this actually felt _normal_. It had been over a year now, and he'd settled in to this time. It wasn't home - nothing but the _Enterprise_ and the star-speckled vastness of space would ever be home to him - but he'd been able to make a fairly decent go of it. In some ways, he was actually better suited to the 21st century than the 23rd - in this time he didn't have to deal with the intricacies of the Starfleet bureaucracy, or sit through excruciatingly long diplomatic dinners. Here he had the freedom to actually go ahead and do things without having to worry about piles upon piles of rules, regulations, and red tape. It was more than a little liberating.

He didn't even try to stop the proud smile that spread across his face as they approached the Wharf proper. They'd come a long way over the past twelve months. His kids, the same ones he'd started teaching basic maintenance right after he'd first arrived, had really started to blossom. Jim had made a point of coming down here at least once a week to spend time with them, sometimes teaching them practical skills like basic self-defense, sometimes telling them everything he knew about history, literature, music, or anything else he could remember. At first he'd only had a few regulars, but now he usually ended up meeting with at least fifty teenagers. The beauty of it was that these kids remembered what they'd learned and passed it on to everyone they knew, creating an ever-widening circle of people who were starting to realize that there could be more to life than just scrambling to surive. Jim had been right in thinking that what these people really needed was for someone to actually give a shit about them - yeah, the Wharf was still run down and had much more crime than other parts of San Francisco, but it had clearly started to make changes for the better. The people walked with more confidence these days, made eye contact with those they knew and didn't automatically shy away from those they didn't, and were taking action to defend their welfare against the street gangs and cartels. When Jim had first arrived, the Wharf had been a slum with no real concept of community. Now, however, it was finally starting to find that energy.

Of course, Jim had to give credit where credit was due. There was no way he could have ever started this sort of change by himself, and he knew it. Kenichi and Leonard had been crucial: Kenichi in helping Jim give instruction in the martial arts and also showing the residents how to create small container gardens, Leonard in providing some basic medical training once they started getting more confidence. The three of them of them were doing something real here, something that was making an actual difference, and damned if Jim didn't like it.

"So do you believe me yet?" muttered Jim as a group of three teenagers spotted them and started to wave enthusiastically. "Or do you still think it's impossible for just one small action to start shifting the status quo?"

Leonard snorted. "What, you expect me to roll over and hail you as a goddamned miracle worker?" His tone was as sarcastic as always, but the look of pride and respect in his eyes warmed Jim through and through.

"It's not a miracle." Jim shoved Leonard in the direction of the old storefront that now served as his clinic. "It's just what happens when you show people that they don't have to settle for absolute shit."

"Hmmph. Whatever you say." Leonard leaned forward and pressed a quick kiss to the corner of Jim's mouth. "Be back here by four, yeah?"

"Got it." Jim grinned and turned away, hurrying toward the teens who'd spotted him. They were working on getting solar panels installed on one of the old restaurants that they wanted to convert to a central shelter, a place where people could sleep in safety and get a decent meal. They were making good progress on it; Jim figured they'd be done in another week or so.

"Hey." Alexander Bashir, a dark-haired teenager with olive skin and mischievous gray eyes, materialized at Jim's elbow and shoved a battered computer tablet under his nose. "Check this out. We've been thinking that the solar panels might work okay in summer, but they'll be pretty much useless in winter. Maybe a small wind turbine would be better...?"

They'd barely started walking toward the shell of the old building before the rattling sound of machine gun fire erupted across the Wharf, sending everyone running for cover. Jim cursed loudly and grabbed at Alexander, pulling the boy toward the relative safety offered by the crumbling remains of a brick wall. He slowed down just enough to check that the kid was okay - Alexander's eyes were wide and scared, but he wasn't bleeding - then reached into his waistband and pulled out the 2015 Smith & Wesson he kept there. It still felt awkward and clunky in his hand, so much heavier than a phaser, but he'd turned out to be good with it.

He hadn't even wanted it at first, but Leonard had insisted. The second week after his arrival Leonard had thrust the handgun at him, ignoring Jim's spluttered protests.

 _"I don't care about any cherished ideals you might have_ ," he'd said, his hazel eyes hard. _"In this city, if you want to survive you need to be able to point a gun at someone and shoot to kill. If you can't defend yourself, you're done for."_

And Jim _could_ shoot to kill - he'd done it before, on away missions that had gone south - but he hadn't really appreciated just how different the weaponry of the twenty-first and twenty-third centuries were until he'd used them first hand. Phasers were a remarkably civilized weapon. They didn't have the same heft as a handgun, didn't produce the same jarring _crack_ of bullet fire. They were lethal, of course, and Jim knew first-hand just how much the burns hurt, but there was something so horribly visceral about seeing blood splatter out from head wounds or watching people fall to the ground clutching their abdomens as blood oozed out from between their fingers.

Only a few days after he'd showed up here, Kenichi had been caught in the crossfire between two of the larger street gangs. By the time he managed to stumble back to the safehouse he'd been pale and gasping for breath, his entire left side drenched with blood. Leonard had immediately set to work with Jim as his nurse, and Jim had vivid memories of watching Leonard insert forceps into the bleeding hole in order to extract the bullet while Kenichi fixed his eyes on the ceiling and gritted his teeth against the pain. They hadn't had any kind of anesthetics to make the process easier - ever the altruist, Leonard had used what little they had earlier that day in order to help a group of older women who had been badly beaten in a food riot - and the whole experience had made Jim vow that he would never give M'Benga a hard time when he was stuck in sickbay again. There were plenty of things a lot worse than osteoregenerators and hyposprays. A _lot_ worse.

And so Jim hated the brutal nature of guns, but he would use them. Especially when it came to defending someone else.

He peered cautiously over the top of the wall, swearing when he noticed the red armbands the instigators were sporting. The Red Dragons were one of San Francisco's most notorious street gangs, feared because they weren't affiliated with any of the cartels and had no aims other than to instill as much fear and panic as possible. They'd kept to the western parts of San Francisco for most of the winter months, but now it looked like they were spreading out through the rest of the city.

"Just stay down," he hissed at Alexander. "Stay down, and keep out of sight."

People were screaming and moaning, and the air was thick with fear. Jim took a deep breath and took aim at the nearest Dragon. There was no time to hesitate; he pulled the trigger and watched the man go down. Other shots rang out over the area and a few more gang members stumbled and fell, clutching at the dark patches spreading across their clothes. Jim took another breath, aimed, and fired. A bullet whizzed by his ear, sending pieces of mortar up into the air. Jim blinked away the sweat from his eyes and _focused_ , reminding himself that this was no different than dozens of other away missions gone bad. He could do this.

The Dragons were starting to disperse, firing their weapons a into the air and shouting slogans. Jim eased his head up cautiously to take stock of the situation, and his breath caught in his throat as he came face to face with the business end of a pistol. The Dragon holding it smirked coldly and started to pull the trigger...

...and his head exploded, blood and brains spewing out onto the pavement. Jim stared blankly at the limp corpse in shock, and was only able to look away when fingers snapped in his face.

Leonard smiled grimly, his eyes as bleak as the war-torn landscape. "You might be a goddamn miracle worker, Jim," he said, his voice thick and strained, "but we've still got a long way to go."

"Yeah." Jim swallowed hard, looking out at the scene. Just a few minutes of gunfire had managed to destroy a good portion of what they'd worked so hard to build. The free standing solar array they'd just gotten up and running was now twisted, broken, and useless, and the injured were crying softly in pain as their friends and family huddled around them. The whole scene spoke of misery and defeat.

Jim looked back at Leonard. "Yeah," he said again. "I know." He sighed and tucked the Smith & Wesson back into his waistband. His shoulder throbbed painfully; he'd gotten nicked by a stray bullet and hadn't even noticed until now. "So we start again. Running away and crying over and over again is no way to live."

"Right." Leonard watched him with a tight and unhappy expression on his face, and before Jim could take so much as a single step Leonard had grabbed his arm and was pulling him into a swift, hard kiss, his hand tight around Jim's neck as if to make sure he couldn't slip away. Jim couldn't even start to respond before Leonard broke away, moving his lips to Jim's ear to whisper harshly, "Just don't die on me, you hear?" and then hurrying away to help the wounded.

Jim watched him go, his heart beating a quick staccato rhythm in his chest, then turned to Alexander. The teen had gotten to his feet and was looking at the destruction with a kind of world-weary cynicism that hurt Jim to see.

"Now what?" he asked, tired and downtrodden.

Jim sighed and clapped his shoulder. "We start picking up the pieces," he said. "We learn from what just happened, and the next time these bastards show up," he smiled grimly, his eyes cold and hard, "we'll be _ready_."

  
**Inevitability**   


**USS Enterprise Stardate 2261.144**

"'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'" Spock resisted the very un-Vulcan urge to heave a sigh of frustration, and settled for resting his elbows on the table and steepling his fingers. "The only explanation for Lieutenant Evans' disappearance is that it was caused by the angel."

"How?" Uhura all but snapped. Her appearance was as immaculate as ever - not a hair out of place, uniform perfectly clean and pressed - but the strain of having lost first the Captain and now a crew member under mysterious circumstances was taking its toll on all of them. Tempers and patience were both running short.

"If Evans had left the ship using either a shuttle or the transporter, there would be a record of it." Spock glanced briefly at Scotty, who nodded in confirmation. "Furthermore, the computer in the astrophysics lab indicates that he first accessed the data at 1100 hours, with the final modification occurring at just past 0300. The security camera footage shorts out at 0330. It is highly unlikely that these events are merely coincidental."

"Is more," chimed in Chekov. Even the navigator's almost perpetually bright spirits had flagged, and there were dark circles under his eyes. "Ve have detected an anomaly similar to what occurred on Osiris VI vhen the Keptin disappeared. Is not quite as strong, but is definitely the same ewent."

"Right, but how did the angel get on board the ship?" Sulu looked around the table, waiting for someone to answer him. "The computer logs don't record any unregistered beings beaming aboard the ship. There's no way it could have gotten here without us knowing."

"Then perhaps we brought it with us," suggested Spock mildly. "We have never encountered this particular entity before, and can therefore assume that we are not familiar with all of its attributes. Given the fact that Evans was examining the footage of the angel at the time of his disappearance, we can conjecture that it might have left an imprint of itself in the recording. That is not outside the realm of possibility."

There was a pause as everyone considered that. Scotty looked intrigued, Chekov was bent over his PADD muttering to himself, probably cross-referencing any species the Federation had encountered with similar capabilities, and both Sulu and Uhura looked more than a little nervous.

"Suppose it did transfer its abilities to the recording," said Sulu after a moment. "Why would it attack us now? I mean, it's been three weeks since Jim disappeared. Its had plenty of time to kill us off one by one. So why now, and why Evans? If it's going after the people who were there on Osiris VI, why wouldn't it go after Spock?" He glanced over at Spock. "No offense, sir, but you are next in the chain of command, after all."

"Do not concern yourself, Lieutenant; there is none taken." Spock closed his eyes briefly, trying to think the matter through. "At the time of his disappearance, Lieutenant Evans was working with the algorithm being used to track disruptions in the time continuum, correct?"

"Da." Chekov nodded. "It appears that he had been working on changes to the calculation."

"Ah." Spock nodded. "Then perhaps the angel chose to attack Evans not for his position in the chain of command -" Spock inclined his head toward Sulu, who flushed a dull red "- but because of the work he was doing."

"Then y'think he was gettin' close to a way of gettin' Jim back?" Scotty's face broke into a smile. "Ach, that's fantastic news!" He seemed to realize what he said as soon as the words left his mouth, and coughed slightly in embarrassment. "Other than that it made Evans disappear, o'course."

"It would be best to remember that, Commander Scott." Spock's eyebrow twitched upward, just a bit, and he turned back to his PADD. "Now, then. If the angel chose to attack Evans based on the work he was doing, we can conjecture that, as Mr. Scott has pointed out, he was close to developing a solution to the problem of what happened to the Captain."

"And ve continue where he left off." A spark of enthusiasm brought some animation back to Chekov's face. "Ve can retrieve the Keptin, and then Evans!"

"That is the idea. There is, however, a complication." Spock paused briefly. "It is likely that anyone who attempts to continue this work will suffer a fate similar to that of Lieutenant Evans. Before we can proceed any further, we need to find a way to prevent this tragedy from occurring again."

"So, anyone have any ideas?" asked Sulu after a moment, his smile just a bit nervous.

No one answered.

* * *

When Spock's door chimed it was well past midnight. Spock was not asleep, of course - as a general rule, Vulcans required much less sleep than humans - but visitors this late into ship's night were a rare occurrence. He took a moment to compose himself, reaching down to adjust the loose fitting, traditional Vulcan robes he favored when off duty, then called for the person to enter.

It was Uhura. She was still in uniform, but a few strands of hair had worked free of her bun and drifted loosely around her face like wisps of dark silk. Spock remembered vividly how it had felt to run his fingers through her hair when she let it hand loose down her back, and felt a sudden urge to reach out and push those errant locks back into place.

"Lieutenant," he said, and was relieved that his voice was as steady and polite as ever.

"Spock." She seemed to hesitate for a moment, as though torn between the urge to stay and the urge to leave, then squared her shoulders and marched further into his room, sitting down on his small couch and tossing her PADD onto the low table. "Here," she said. "I think I might have found something. The Organian Annals of History have a reference to a kind of demon known as either the "Lonely Assassins" or the "Weeping Angels." They have the appearance of statues, but that's only a defense mechanism. They're quantum-locked - when someone's looking at them they turn to stone and you're safe, but once you look away, or even blink, they can attack."

"Ah." Spock reached for the PADD and looked over the data. He couldn't help but be impressed by what he saw. "Fascinating. According to this text, the Angels do not feed on physical matter, but instead sustain themselves on potential energy. That would explain the time distortion we observed - it sent Jim back to the past so that it could consume the possibility of his future." He felt the same way he did when he watched an experienced chess player execute a particularly elegant move; admiration mixed with a certain ruefulness that he had not seen it coming.

Uhura nodded. "That's the gist of it, yes." She reached forward and tapped lightly at the screen. "There's a side note as well. It was rather difficult to decipher -" she flushed slightly, clearly pleased that she'd been able to do so, not that Spock would ever judge her for being justly proud of her linguistic talent, " - but from what I've gathered, they do have some kind of transference ability. The closest translation of the text says, 'Anything that holds the image of an angel, becomes itself an angel.'" She looked up at Spock, her gaze focused and intent. "You understand, right? The footage that you brought back from Osiris VI is dangerous. It's not just a captured image; it's an actual entity. A hostile entity."

Spock raised an eyebrow. "Surely that is easy enough to solve? It would seem that all we need to do is destroy the appropriate data chips."

"In theory, but both Scotty and Chekov think that doing so poses a risk." A small smile crept across Uhura's features, one that seemed to say, _Did you really think it would be that easy? On this ship?_ "The fact that the Angels consume _potential_ energy is a complication. They think that because this particular manifestation of the Angel has in essence consumed a portion of Lieutenant Evans' life, destroying it might prevent us from safely retrieving Evans. Scotty's set up a constant guard on the Angel so that it can't attack, but that's about all he's willing to do at the moment."

"Ah." Spock closed his eyes in contemplation. "I understand. If we destroy the Angel, we might also risk losing Evans' own future."

Uhura nodded. "Exactly."

"And that in turn means that retrieving both him and the Captain might not be as straightforward as simply traveling to their current point in time and bringing them forward. Because their potential existence in the twenty-second century has been consumed, they would simply cease to exist at the moment of their disappearance."

Uhura said nothing. Spock got to his feet and moved to the window, staring out at the glittering sea of stars. It seemed as if the more they learned, the more complicated the situation became. The Angels were beautiful in the elegance of their attacks, terrifying in how seemingly invulnerable they were. A formidable enemy to be sure.

"I wish we had never come to Osiris VI," murmured Spock, his voice thick with regret. "I wish that we had never encountered this creature." The words _I wish I had not lost Jim_ were there on the tip of his tongue, but he would never bring himself to say them.

He heard a soft rustling as Uhura got to her feet, and then a gentle hand came to rest lightly on his shoulder. Spock hesitated for just a moment before reaching up to brush his fingers against hers...

The door chimed again, and the sense of intimacy between them was lost. Uhura drew her shoulders back, once again the consummate professional, and Spock rose to admit the newcomer.

It was Lieutenant Sulu, and his smile was a cross between exuberant and manic.

"I know where the Captain is. And when."

 

 **San Francisco - March 2053**

Jim remembered reading twentieth-century history back in high school and thinking that the first two World Wars were punctuated by moments of high drama that somehow managed to impact entire countries. World War I had the Shot Heard 'Round the World, that notorious assassin's bullet that had felled Archduke Franz Ferdinand and plunged Europe into turmoil, while World War II had the Blitz, Pearl Harbor, and Emperor Hirohito's soft, frail voice telling the Japanese people that in defeat they would be asked to "endure the unendurable and suffer the insufferable." Moments like that were ear-marked for history as soon as they happened. Their significance was a tangible, undeniable thing.

World War III had started with a bang, with opinions over genetic engineering and human rights running high, but once the nukes started to fly, any sense of a _global_ conflict had fallen by the wayside. Most of the world's population was too busy coping with a severely crippled infrastructure and the resulting civil unrest to worry about government agendas. They knew when more bombs fell, of course, and were aware that the New United Nations had at least made an attempt to bring international aggression to a halt in order to facilitate a return to stability, but by the 2040s no one really cared about the war as a whole. They were too tired.

The war ended on a powerful note, however, and Jim was watching for signs of a sea change. He remembered reading that after almost thirty years of war, people all over the world started to decry the culture of militarism and demand an end to it. The New UN had tried, but the strength of will needed to actually carry it through hadn't quite been there when it was formed. Now, though... it was blatantly obvious that the ongoing conflict was accomplishing nothing other than dragging the entire world backward in terms of social, economic, and scientific development, and people were sick of it. They wanted to rebuild, wanted the chance to have a peaceful, normal existence. They wanted to start over. Wanted to _live_.

Jim knew that on some level that couldn't be named or pointed to, things were coming to a head. The San Francisco Conference was now only six months away, and the bits and pieces of news that he managed to pick up over the internet showed that people were getting restless. The European Confederacy was moving further and further toward outright revolution if things didn't start to stabilize, while the Japanese islands had actually overthrown their leaders and had officially declared their withdrawal from the conflict. Kenichi had been particularly pleased by that announcement, and had opened one of his last remaining bottles of dearly obtained sake in celebration.

That didn't necessarily mean anything, though. Jim was smart enough to know that there were plenty of people who didn't want any kind of return to normalcy. The powerful black market cartels, the gangs like the Red Dragons that could run wild in the absence of strong centralized law enforcement...they thrived in the current situation. They didn't want their power to be superseded. Hell, some of them might even have the power to try and sabotage the conference.

Jim frowned, thinking back to eleventh grade history. There had been a crisis, hadn't there? One of the initial delegates had been corrupt, hadn't he? Only something had happened just before the conference that had stopped him from attending, or something like that? He hadn't thought much about it back when he'd read it as a teenager, but now something in his gut was telling him that this was important. He reached up and pressed a hand against his forehead. If he could just _remember_...

Only he couldn't. It was blurry and confused, and that in and of itself sent a shiver down his spine. Time travel was a tricky thing. Maybe the future wasn't as written in stone as he'd thought. Maybe his very presence was causing things to shift and rearrange -

"Jim?"

Jim blinked and looked up. Leonard was staring at him, thick eyebrows drawn together in worry.

"You doing all right? Seem a little out of it."

"Yeah." Jim forced what he hoped was a reassuring smile on to his lips and hefted his backpack onto one shoulder. "Just have a bit of a headache is all. You ready to head out?"

Leonard didn't move. "Jim..."

"We should get going. We need to get there early; you're the one always telling me that. If we're lucky we might get some canned fish or something."

"Jim!"

The level of annoyance in Leonard's voice gave Jim pause. He turned back and raised his eyebrows. "Yeah?"

Leonard sighed and stepped forward, reaching up to cup Jim's chin in his hands. "Hey," he said softly. "You look like your head is about to break apart. What's going on? Talk to me."

Jim wanted to let himself relax into Leonard's arms, wanted to rest his head on his lover's shoulder and just forget about everything. He wanted to let go. He felt as though he were getting more and more stretched out the longer he stayed here - he'd managed to adapt, sure, but this wasn't his time. He missed feeling the constant throb of the _Enterprise_ , missed the endless panorama of the stars, missed his crew.

He wanted to go home.

"I feel like I'm forgetting something," he said after a moment. "Something important. Like there's something I'm supposed to be doing, but I can't quite put my finger on it."

Leonard just held him for a minute, his fingers stroking gently down the path of Jim's spine. "I know what you mean," he said eventually. "You remember when I told you that I have memories of eating peaches off the tree as a kid?" Jim nodded against Leonard's shoulder, and Leonard continued. "It drives me crazy. I know what dreams are like, and these aren't dreams. But the thing is, peaches haven't grown in that part of Georgia since the late 2010s."

"Did your parents tell you about them?" Jim stepped back so that he could see Leonard's face. "They told you about them so often it feels like a memory?"

Leonard shrugged. "I don't really remember my parents. I figure they died in that lightning storm I told you about. The people I grew up with found me after it happened."

For a moment Jim felt as if he couldn't breathe. He'd thought before that it couldn't possibly be coincidence that Leonard had memories of a lightning storm that sounded eerily like the one that had marked the Narada's incursion, and this new piece of data only intensified the feeling. And then he knew, with the same certainty that had told him they were warping into a trap over Vulcan, that Leonard wasn't from this time. He was from the twenty-third century, same as Jim, only he couldn't remember it. He'd been too young.

Leonard pressed his hand against Jim's forehead. "Maybe you shouldn't go anywhere today. You look like you might be coming down with something."

"No." Jim reached up to twine his fingers together with Leonard's. "I'm fine. There's just a lot on my mind."

"If you say so." Leonard still looked doubtful, but he let his hands fall away from Jim's face and stepped back. "Ready to go, then?"

The rest of the day passed in a blur. They made their way to the food distribution point to collect that week's rations, then Leonard went off to check in on a family living near Russian Hill who had a sick daughter while Jim headed back to the Wharf. By the time they reconvened at the safehouse the sky was turning the murkier gray of sunset and they were all tired enough that the dinner conversation was minimal.

Before they shut the generator off, however, Kenichi pulled out a beat-up digital camera and set it carefully on their pile of dog-eared paperbacks. "I picked this up and figured we'd be able to use it," he said with a grin. "You know, to document what we've been doing in the Wharf. Come on, let's try it out."

The three of them huddled close together and waited for the timer to go off. The flash went off, all three of them snorting a bit with suppressed laughter, and Kenichi grabbed it to check the image.

"Came out just fine," he said with a grin, and passed it around.

Jim stared down at the tiny image captured on the scratched LCD screen and felt something warm in his chest. _My friends_ , he thought, and smiled. _These are my friends_.

* * *

That night, Jim dreamed.

In his dream, he was back on the bridge of the _Enterprise_ looking out at the familiar view of space. Chekov and Sulu were at the helm, and he could hear Uhura murmuring softly into her communicator. Everything was normal, and familiar, and yet something felt different from how he remembered things. Jim frowned, trying to place it. It wasn't alarming. It was just perplexing.

He looked over his shoulder just in time to see Leonard step out of the turbolift (and yes, he looked just as good in Starfleet blue as Jim had imagined he would), and something deep inside Jim seemed to loosen and relax at the sight. His lips curved up in a smile, and when Leonard took his position just behind the Captain's chair it felt so very _right_.

Jim tilted his head back to grin up at him. "Sickbay too boring for ya, Bones?" he asked, the nickname slipping out unbidden ( _and where had **that** come from; he'd certainly never called Leonard that_ ).

Leonard sighed and rolled his eyes. "Someone's got to keep an eye on you."

Jim laughed and started to reply, but the dream was shifting and changing -

\- and now he was back in twenty-first century San Francisco, only it was even worse than the one he knew. In this San Francisco the rubble was still smoking, and the gangs roamed the streets freely. The sky was streaked with fire, and the air was full of cries of pain. Jim stumbled through the burning landscape, blood trickling down his forehead, searching desperately for Leonard. He needed to find him.

When he did, though, he almost wished he hadn't.

Leonard was lying in a pool of his own blood, his eyelashes fluttering lightly against pale cheeks. Jim knelt next to him and stroked his hair gently, trying to soothe him.

"Leonard," he murmured, soft and regretful. "Leonard."

Leonard's eyes opened, and he reached up to brush Jim's lips with his cold fingers. "Jim," he said, and his voice was tight with strain. "Jim, you have to stop this."

"Stop what?" asked Jim desperately.

"Stop this from happening." Leonard's eyes were desperate. "Please, Jim. Don't let this be our future."

"Leonard," said Jim. "Leonard, I don't -"

"Jim!"

Jim opened his eyes with a gasp. It took him a moment to realize where he was: the dark, close basement of the San Francisco safehouse. He and Leonard were squashed onto the mattress they shared; he could hear Kenichi grunt softly in his sleep from across the room. Jim sucked in a deep breath, trying to be quiet, and buried his face in Leonard's chest, seeking the comfort of the other man's heartbeat.

"You okay?" murmured Leonard. "It sounded like you were having quite a dream."

"Yeah." Jim groped for Leonard's hand, and sighed in relief when he could twine their fingers firmly together. The dream had felt uncannily real; less like a dream and more like...what? A vision?

Leonard tugged Jim a little closer. "Jus' go back t'sleep," he slurred. "Be better in th' mornin.'" Within seconds his breathing had evened out and he was gone, slipped back into whatever dreamworld he visited at night.

Jim hoped it was nicer than the one he'd just left.

* * *

Two months later Jim got what he'd been waiting for. Word trickled down through the internet that the leaders of the European Confederation, the United States, and the Asian Coalition had agreed to come together in an historic conference to end open hostilities and begin global rebuilding. Moreover, the meeting would take place in San Francisco, site of the founding of the original United Nations. The entire city seemed to become super charged in light of the announcement, with people becoming less cautious and more friendly toward each other, and real effort going into rebuilding the heavily damaged infrastructure. There was a sense of optimism on a scale that Jim hasn't seen since he first arrived, and it was making everyone act just a little bit drunk.

"You've been doing better," observed Leonard one evening as they made their way through the winding streets of Russian Hill. There was a smudge of red on the horizon, which was as much of a sunset as they ever got, and the air was warm enough that they could leave their jackets unbuttoned. "You haven't been as distracted the past few weeks."

Jim just smiled and pulled him into a kiss.

He found the problem three days later. The official delegate for the United States was Mark Robinson, hailing from the wealthy gated communities on the Eastern Seaboard where there was still stability and prosperity -- and, most importantly, politics. He was the kind of man who knew nothing about what life was like for the vast majority of people struggling to eke out a living on a devastated continent, and didn't care to find out. Jim read all of the man's press releases; they were the usual uplifting phrases about A New Beginning and An End To The Dark Times, but something in them rang false. The words left a foul taste in the back of Jim's throat, like accidentally biting down into something soft and rancid.

So Jim dug deep into the man's personal history. It was easy enough: hacking twenty-first century networks was child's play compared to what he'd done in his own time. He had, after all, hacked the Kobayashi Maru. All it took was two hours or so of digging and tweaking and investigating and he'd uncovered a goldmine of information.

It made him feel sick to his stomach.

A lot of it was what he'd expected. Robinson had connections to all the major black-market syndicates in North America: Red Dragons, Black Knights, Ragnarok - the list went on and on. That wasn't surprising. What made Jim curse out loud was the evidence that Robinson saw the Conference as an excuse to force an agenda that would leave the United States at the head of a new world order, a world order that would be enforced with the development of a new line of biological weaponry. It was essentially a revival of the Project for a New American Century backed by thugs, and Jim could tell that all that would accomplish was further polarization of a broken world. They needed unity and equality, not imperialism.

Jim pushed the laptop away and took a deep breath. He could not trust the future of the world - more than the world, really, because this conference was vital; the future of the _Federation_ \- to a man like Robinson.

He still couldn't remember what exactly the history books said ( _why, why why?_ ), but he knew what he needed to do. Now he just needed to find a way to tell Leonard.

 **USS Enterprise - Stardate 2261.145**

Jim's smiling face gazed up at Spock from a distance of two centuries. The shadows under his eyes were deeper than when Spock had seen him last, and the rest of his face had a gaunt, hungry look, but it was unmistakably the Captain. Just seeing those blue eyes and cocky smile was enough to make some of the tension Spock had been carrying with him since the incident on Osiris VI ease, if only a little.

Spock regarded the other two men in the photograph. The one on the left was Hikaru Sulu's great-great-grandfather, Kenichi, and Spock thought that he could see a certain family resemblance in the tilt of the lips and the flash of humor shining out from dark eyes. The man to Jim's right, however, was an unknown. He had scruffy dark hair and a shadow of stubble on his strong chin, and, unlike his two companions, his expression was more of a scowl than a smile.

"I found it by chance," said Sulu, his eternally boyish face bright with excitement. "My older sister's having her first child soon, and so we're all going through our old photographs to put together a kind of family history book for her. We have a lot of old pictures from war-time San Francisco, and this just fell out. Freaky, huh?"

"Quite," murmured Spock. His finger tapped against the third man's face. "Do you know this person's identity?"

Sulu shook his head. "There's a note in the album that says his name's Leonard McCoy. Apparently he and Granddad Kenichi were holed up together during the war, but he vanished just after the San Francisco Peace Conference. No one knows what happened to him."

"I see. And as for Jim..."

"It seems like Granddad never knew his last name. He was just some guy who turned up. That wasn't really unusual back then." Sulu shrugged. "He doesn't seem to have been anyone important. Not then, anyway."

"Perhaps. Thank you for bringing this to me, Mr. Sulu. As you were." Spock waited until the doors swished shut behind Sulu before turning to the photograph again with a frown. The face of Leonard McCoy stirred something inside of him, like a memory that had been long-forgotten and was now struggling to return to the surface. A _katra_ that was lost and was now seeking its proper place.

Jim Kirk, Captain of the USS _Enterprise_. Kenichi Sulu, ancestor of the _Enterprise_ 's pilot. And then Leonard McCoy, who appeared to be nothing more than an average citizen of twenty-first century San Francisco who had somehow fallen in with the two other men. Spock doubted that McCoy was a random element in this particular equation. He had to have some place in the greater whole. The question was what it was.

And why did the man look so _familiar_...?

Spock allowed himself the luxury of a small internal sigh before seating himself at his desk and activating his PADD datalink. He was willing to hazard a guess that tracking this Leonard McCoy was going to require a fair bit of effort - references to anyone who had lived during the decades of the Third World War were obscure at best, and were more often than not completely nonexistent. The chances of finding anything whatsoever about this man were positively minuscule. Perhaps not even worth the effort. Spock allowed that thought to rise to the forefront of his mind, examined it, then calmly picked up his PADD and set to work.

Some three hours later, he sat back with a faint smile of satisfaction dancing over his lips. It had been as frustrating and tedious as he'd expected, but he had identified a record of one Leonard McCoy born in Savannah, Georgia in 2227. There were no references to him in the following census, although there were a few articles in the local paper describing the disappearance of a six-year old child during a freak atmospheric storm. For all intents and purposes, Leonard McCoy had vanished in 2233 never to be seen or heard from again.

What was interesting, however, were the references to a Leonard McCoy who had lived in 21st century San Francisco. He seemed to have come out of nowhere - the first records of him were when he'd registered for receiving medical supplies from the local government - but that was nothing unusual for the time. Even the name itself was nothing particularly unusual, but Spock could not deny the overpowering sense of recognition that ran through his senses when he saw the name. It was the same feeling he'd had when he saw the photograph. Something deep inside of him knew with unshakable certainty that the six-year old Leonard McCoy who had vanished and the older Leonard McCoy in war-torn San Francisco a century earlier were one and the same, and that this was a man he was supposed to know.

The Vulcans were first and foremost a logical people, and yet they had never disregarded the value of intuition. Spock let his fingers rest over the face of Leonard McCoy, the doctor from his own time who now resided in the past, then looked at Jim's smiling visage. Even though the picture was of three men, there was an undeniable sense of intimacy between the Captain and the doctor. Spock could not deny the small surge of sadness that observation caused in him, but at the same time he felt at peace.

 _Perhaps the two of you were always destined_ , he thought. _And that it why you and I were never able to share a true connection_.

He did not have time to linger over that thought, however. His comm unit chirped urgently, and Spock laid the photograph aside.

"This is Spock."

"Aye, Captain." Commander Scott's brogue was more pronounced than usual, a sure indication that he was excited about something. "We've been workin' on this here problem about what t'do about th' Angel, an' we think we've got somethin.' If ye'd be so kind as to come down t'the astrophsyics lab ye can take a look."

"On my way." Spock rose to his feet and left the room, resisting the urge to look back at the photograph. There were greater things that needed his consideration now.

The astrophysics lab was quite crowded by the time he arrived. A group of people that included both Commander Scott and Ensign Chekov were clustered around the central worktable babbling excitedly at the top of their voices. Spock could only catch a few phrases here and there over the din.

"- technology's been illegal ever since Vulcan -"

"- no guarantee this will even work -"

Scotty glanced over his shoulder and raised a hand in greeting. "Ah, Captain, glad you're here." He beckoned him over. "We might've found a way around the potential energy problem."

"And I am eager to hear it." Spock took his place at the table, ignoring the way everyone drew to rigid attention almost immediately. They had always acknowledged Jim's rank, of course, but they had been at ease in the presence of Captain Kirk in a way they were not in his own. It had never bothered Spock, of course, but now it served as one more reminder of the way in which the _Enterprise_ had become imbalanced. "Please explain your research to me."

"It is the Red Matter." Chekov leaned forward eagerly, his fingers flying across the work table's touchscreen to call up a myriad of charts and graphs. "Captain Nero used it to travel back through time, but that was a wery - how to say it - it was wery sloppy, yes?" He did not wait for a reply. "But is possible to refine the technology in order to create a precision event. Ve can use it to create a small temporal wortex into which we throw the Angel. Because the Angel itself is temporal in nature, casting it into the wortex vill neutralize it." He beamed. "The Angel wanishes, and the Keptin and Evans are restored."

"An elegant solution," agreed Spock. "But it seems rather simple, does it not?"

"Ach, Captain," said Scotty with a grin. "Sometimes the simplest solution is the best, aye?"

Spock conceded the point with a nod. "That might be true, but given that this particular situation is one we have never seen before it is best to proceed with caution."

"And ain't that the truth." Scotty grinned. "But this could work! Neutralize one temporal event with another. 'S brilliant."

"And you propose to use the red matter technology in order to create this vortex." Spock's eyebrow began to inch toward his hairline. "Doing so would violate the terms of the treaty signed between the Romulan Star Empire and the Federation after the _Narada_ incident."

"Ve would modify it," said Chekov hesitantly. "Creating an incident on a larger scale has potential to be catastrophic, yes, but something just zis size vould be manageable."

"It only took slightly more than a milliliter of material to implode an entire planet." Spock paused for a moment, remembering how Vulcan had been there, and then gone. "How can there be any guarantee that we can manage to create a temporal disturbance that we can retain control of?"

Scotty and Chekov exchanged glances; the other scientists just stared down at the data. Spock clasped his hands behind his back and spoke again, his voice calm and composed.

"Commander Scott, Ensign Chekov. If you would be so kind as to send me your report, I will look it over. You can expect a reply within three hours."

"Aye, Keptin," said Chekov, followed by Scotty's more exuberant, "Aye, sir!"

Spock spent about thirty minutes looking over the report. The logic was sound, not that he expected anything else from the crew of the _Enterprise_. They were among the best in their fields, every one of them, and they would have considered all of the possibilities. There was the matter of the illegal technology, but Spock was willing to overlook that. Or at least cover their tracks.

There was not much, he thought somewhat ruefully, that he would be unwilling to consider for the sake of his Captain.

He signed off on the orders to proceed with the experiment, laid the PADD aside, then left his quarters. The crew members he passed saluted him briskly and he nodded in response, but he did not stop to speak to them. He didn't stop for anything until he arrived at the secure cell where they kept the projection of the Angel.

The three officers on duty did not acknowledge him, but Spock would have reprimanded them if they had. They kept their eyes fixed on the flickering image of the stone Angel whose blank gaze stared straight ahead. Spock regarded it in silence. The Angels were fascinating creatures, really. He could appreciate the elegant simplicity of their defense mechanism, in spite of the difficulty they were causing him.

He heard footsteps behind him, and a slim hand came to rest on his shoulder. He glanced over at Nyota and inclined his head in greeting, something loosening in his chest at the sight of her calm, competent expression and steady dark eyes.

"We'll need to destroy both the projection and the original simultaneously," she said after they'd been standing for a moment in companionable silence. "A new away team needs to go down to the surface."

"I intend to lead it."

"Of course," murmured Nyota, a faint smile dancing across her lips. "I wouldn't expect anything else."

"I believe," said Spock, "that it might be possible for us to contact Jim. He still had his PADD with him when he disappeared. While the distance separating us is...considerable, I am sure that we can find a way to sync our technologies."

Nyota laughed. "Chekov's way ahead of you. He's figured out a way to transmit a data packet to Jim - nothing big, just enough to let him know that we're planning an extraction. We'll only have a short window of opportunity to get him."

"I am aware of that," murmured Spock in reply.

They lapsed back into silence after that. After a moment, Nyota reached out to twine her fingers with his own, and Spock did not pull away.

 **San Francisco - April 2053**

"I need to kill a man."

Jim saw Leonard's shoulders tense and his mouth curve downward into a frown, but the other man didn't break his stride or offer any kind of response. Jim didn't push. He just matched his steps to Leonard's and waited for the other man to say something.

"Why?" asked Leonard finally. His voice wasn't outright condemning the way Jim had thought it would be, but there was a certain chill to it.

Jim took a deep breath. He'd known for a while that he'd have to tell Leonard the truth sooner or later. The question was how spectacular the fallout would be. "Leonard," he began, then hesitated. Started over. "Leonard," he said again. "I know where I'm from. I've always known. I lied when I told you I had amnesia."

Leonard glanced over at him. "I figured as much. You always seemed to hold some things a bit too close to the chest to have lost all your memories." He shrugged. "That doesn't matter, though, Jim. I think just about everyone has something they wish they could forget. So what gives?"

"My place of origin is a bit more unorthodox than most."

Leonard snorted, but not unkindly. "I think most places qualify as being unorthodox these days."

"Yeah, well." Jim coughed. "My hometown is Riverside, Iowa -"

"That's hardly exotic."

" - but I was born in 2233."

Leonard stopped. Turned to look at Jim full-on. "Jim," he said slowly, "that's just not possible."

Jim stared back at him, unsmiling and somber. "You remember when you first found me? What I was dressed like?"

"That was just some costume; you need to take what you can get these days -"

"It's my uniform. I belong to an organization called Starfleet. It's like an interstellar peacekeeping armada that serves the United Federation of Planets."

"The _what_?"

"The United Federation of Planets. It was founded in 2161 by Earth, Tellar, Vulcan, and the Andorian Empire -"

Leonard stared at him. "What in God's green earth is the Andorian Empire?"

Jim couldn't prevent a small grin from rising to his lips. "Let's go home," he said. "This might take a while."

* * *

It took about an hour for them to get to some sort of common ground.

"So in the future we're living in a socialist-pacifist society that stretches out into the vastness of space and everything is so much better than it is now. And you need to kill a man in order to ensure that that future happens."

Jim pushed the tumbler of moonshine across the table toward Leonard. "Pretty much, yeah."

Leonard took a swallow of alcohol and grimaced. "And you expect me to believe this why?"

"Because you know it's true." Jim leaned across the table and stared intently at Leonard. "You remember a violent storm from when you were a child. That wasn't a normal storm. It was a shockwave from a massive temporal disturbance that occurred in 2233. I'll spare you the details, at least for now, but what you need to know is that you were caught in the backdraft. You were born in the twenty-third century, same as me, and just ended up here by accident."

Leonard laughed. "Maybe you really are delusional."

Jim crossed his arms over his chest and narrowed his eyes at Leonard. "And you're in denial. Come on, Leonard. You have childhood memories of things that can't have taken place. You know damn well that storm in your childhood was unusual. You also know it had its origins in space. You told me that yourself, remember?" He didn't give Leonard the chance to form a reply before rushing on. "You feel that pull toward space because something inside you knows there's an imbalance, and it wants to correct it. It wants you to go home."

Leonard was silent. Jim knew he was remembering that warm summer night when they'd sat on the roof and looked at the stars and Leonard had said he remembered the taste of fresh peaches. Jim could sense that on some level, Leonard believed him. His mind knew that he came from someplace else, but years of being trapped here, in a world where time travel was nothing more than science fiction, had made him think that was impossible.

"I have something to show you," said Jim softly. He went to his tiny bundle of possessions - he'd kept his uniform, his phaser (he'd often wished he could use it, but it would stand out too much), and a small PADD. He'd taken it out only a few times since he'd arrived, when he was feeling especially lost and lonely and wanted to look at pictures of his family back on the _Enterprise_. He held it for a second, then turned to Leonard and held it out.

Leonard stared at it and raised his eyebrows. "What's that?"

"It's a Personal Access Display Device. Think of it as a hand-held computer." Jim pulled up a series of photographs of Starfleet Headquarters and pushed the device into Leonard's hands. "Look. That's going to be the Presidio one day."

Leonard was silent as he looked at the images that had been taken two hundred years in the future, his expression a mixture of hope, disbelief, and wonderment. He looked back up at Jim, his eyes wide. "Is this really - " The PADD let out a sudden trill, and he dropped it in shock.

"There's an incoming transmission," said Jim in astonishment, and snatched the PADD back. He laughed aloud when he saw its point of origin.

"It's from Spock."

* * *

Three hours later they still weren't sure what to do.

"Spock can bring us back," said Jim, "can bring _both_ of us back - but we need to take care of this first."

Leonard sighed. "Kill the man, you mean."

"Right. This man." Jim opened the battered old laptop and pulled up what he'd discovered the other day. He shoved it toward Leonard. "Have a look."

"Mark Robinson." Leonard looked at the file and frowned. "So this is the lead delegate for the United States?"

"Right." Jim pulled it back around and switched to a list of classified files he'd found and decrypted. "But you see this? He has direct ties to all the black market syndicates on the west coast. That's not surprising. It gets worse, though." He pulled up another set of data. "Check this out. Plans to install the US as a global dictator backed by bioweapons. We're talking smallpox, neurotoxins, superflu - serious stuff. If he's allowed to attend the Conference, he'll sabotage it and set everything back for years. We could even miss First Contact, and there's no way we can let that happen."

"I'm not arguing he's corrupt. And the bioweapons..." Leonard's shook his head in disgust. "There's no power on Earth that can justify that. But Jim," Leonard turned his head to look back at Jim, and his hazel eyes were dark with worry, "are you sure you need to kill him? I mean, every single story I've ever read that involves time travel warns about the dangers of meddling."

Jim bit his lip. That was the same question he'd been asking himself ever since he realized what the situation was. If he stood by and did nothing, would things work out all right? Or would it just send events into a tailspin?

"I can't risk it," he said finally. "I just can't. It's too important."

Leonard sighed. "But do you really have to _kill_ him? What do your history books actually say happened?"

"Thats just it." Jim shook his head in frustration. "I can't remember. And I _should_ , because even if I was never that big on paying attention in school, the Conference is a huge milestone in history. I should remember what happened."

Leonard's fingers rested on top of his, warm and solid and reassuring. "Maybe that means you have a blank slate now. Maybe this time around, you don't need to kill someone."

"This time around?" Jim laughed helplessly. "That's not the way time works. The future's set, you know? We have to follow the script."

Leonard smiled. "If there's anything I know about you, Jim, it's that you like to make the impossible possible. You don't have to kill this man, Jim. You can come up with another way to set history on the right path."

Jim sighed. "I don't _want_ to. I've never killed anyone lightly. But you were the one who told me that survival in this world means knowing when to pull a trigger without hesitating, and this is one of those times."

Leonard still looked troubled. "The people should be the ones to decide," he insisted. "You should take what you've shown me and spread the word to everyone. Once people know what they stand to lose with this kind of a man as their representative, they won't stand for it."

Jim drummed his fingers restlessly against the table. "And what if you're wrong, and it destroys everything?"

Warm fingers reached out to twine with his own. "Jim," said Leonard, a faint smile dancing across his lips. "Don't you remember it was you who told me I needed to have faith in these people? Now it's your turn." He leaned across the table and kissed Jim, soft and gentle. "Believe in them."

Jim didn't answer in words, just stroked his fingers gently against Leonard's.

* * *

Jim uploaded all the information he had on Robinson to the internet the next day.

Leonard rubbed soothing circles onto his upper back as Jim finished up. Jim sighed and leaned back against him, taking comfort from the other man's reassuring warmth.

"Let the dice fly high," murmured Jim, and turned his head so that he could listen to Leonard's heartbeat. "And what happens, happens."

Leonard didn't say anything in response, but he held Jim tight against his chest.

 **Osiris VI - Stardate 2261.147**

Spock drew in a deep lungful of Osiris VI's dry air and looked over the ruins of the capitol city. It was all the same as the first time he'd been here, a place where history had ground to a halt. Just as before, he could not entirely suppress the feeling that they were trespassers who had no business on this dead world.

If they had come here, they would have never lost Jim. Then again, that would mean that they would not have found out about Leonard McCoy, a stray from their own time. Perhaps everything had happened here for a reason, the universe attempting to right itself after the disturbances caused by the _Narada_.

Spock dismissed that thought almost immediately. It was illogical. This was a series of coincidences, no more - although he thought his counterpart might say otherwise. The other Spock was, after all, unorthodox in many ways.

The away team drew to a halt just outside of the temple structure where Jim had first encountered the angel. Spock looked back at the five officers accompanying them and said, "Remember. We must watch the Angel at all times. Don't even blink."

He was answered with a soft chorus of, 'Aye, sir's, and Spock led the way inside. The device Chekov and Scotty had created was grasped firmly in his hand, surprisingly heavy for its size. It looked almost the same as a standard Federation-issued phaser, other than the shortened barrel and reinforced chamber. It was powered by a single molecule of the red matter's base substance focused through a minuscule dilithium crystal, the power to cut through time itself held within such a small frame. It was a remarkable piece of engineering - unfortunate that the genius that had created it could never be recognized.

The Angel had moved since he was last here. The last time he'd been on Osiris VI its face had been hidden in sorrow, stone wings drawn close to its back. Now its blank eyes were staring straight ahead and its wings were opened wide, looking for all the world like the paintings of the warlike angels he'd once seen while studying Earth's history.

Six pairs of unblinking eyes were fixed on it, however, leaving it immobilized and helpless, nothing more than a statue frozen in place.

 **San Francisco - April 28, 2053**

They mobilized just as dawn was breaking, gathering in the center of Fisherman's Wharf and making their way slowly toward the Presidio. At first it was just the group that Jim, Leonard, and Kenichi had gotten to know so well over the past year, but the longer they walked the more their ranks swelled. Jim's message had done its work, spreading out over the internet and into people's awareness. They were angry, angry that the all-important peace conference was in jeopardy of being eroded from within by a corrupt delegate representing their own country. They were tired. They wanted peace and stability, and had no intention of letting that be stolen from them.

By the time they arrived at the imposing walls surrounding the Presidio complex the sky was a sickly shade of pale gray. A brisk breeze had sprung up, whipping at the clothes and hair of the assembled protesters and carrying the salty tang of the sea to Jim's nostrils. None of them spoke. They just in silence, staring accusingly at the closed gates of the compound.

All around them, history held its breath.

Twenty minutes passed before Mark Robinson himself appeared, dressed in an immaculate gray suit and not a hair out of place. He stood at the top of the walls and stared down at the sea of sad, angry faces. Jim could see the muscles in his jaw twitching.

"I hear you're upset with me," he said, voice amplified by the microphone clipped to his lapel. "I hear you think I don't have your best interests at heart."

There was a roar of anger in response. Robinson raised his hands in a feeble gesture of placation.

"We might have differing views on what role the United States should play -" he began, but he didn't get much further.

There would never be a definitive answer for who exactly killed Mark Robinson. The general assumption was that some anonymous person in the crowd had fired a weapon and scored a lucky shot. Others claimed that they'd spotted a young man sporting the intricate wrist tattoos of Ragnarok putting his gun away and melting back into the crowd, the crime syndicates dealing with someone who had become a liability. It was certain that none of the guardsman posted along the defense perimeter made any attempt to protect him, just watched dispassionately as he stumbled and fell. Whatever the case, Mark Robinson died of a fatal gunshot wound on April 28, 2053, and not one person who was there showed any sign they thought it wasn't deserved.

Jim watched the man crumple and felt numb inside. He'd listened to Leonard when the other man told him that assassination wouldn't work and they needed to rely on the people to prevent the conference from getting derailed before it even began. But as it turned out, the man had died after all, just not by his hand.

"It happened anyway," murmured Jim, watching Richardson's red blood start to ooze out over the concrete. "He was still killed."

"But not by you," answered Leonard, and reached out to squeeze Jim's hand. "Not by you."

 **Osiris VI - Stardate 2261.147**

Spock raised his hand and fired, knowing that Chekov was mirroring his action on board the _Enterprise_. Both Angels, the original and the copy, would be destroyed simultaneously. He held his breath as the blood-colored energy beam hit the Angel and it seemed to shiver and warp, the very fabric of the universe rippling around it and eradicating it from sight, and then -

 **San Francisco - May 16, 2053**

It was one of the rare sunny days in San Francisco, and it seemed like everyone in the city was out to enjoy it. Jim and Leonard were back on Telegraph Hill, the place where they had first met all those months ago, and looked out at the view. Sunshine was sparkling off the waters of the bay, and the sound of music drifted up to them.

"Everyone's celebrating," commented Leonard, his fingers stroking idly against Jim's.

"There's a lot to be happy about." Jim turned his head so he could press a quick kiss against Leonard's ear. "The war's over, people can start rebuilding without worrying when the next bomb's going to fall -"

"Rebuilding anything ain't easy," snorted Leonard. "It's harder'n just about anything else. These people don't know what they're in for."

Jim laughed. "They're in for more than they expect. First Contact is just ten years away."

"About that." Leonard looked at Jim with something like worry in his eyes. "We're supposed to be leaving any time now, right?"

Jim pulled out his PADD and checked the countdown running in the corner. "Three minutes."

"Mmmm." Leonard's eyes were shifting nervously, and Jim could feel his restless energy. "There's a part of me that'd like to see what everyone makes of this new world."

Something clenched in Jim's stomach. Ever since finding out where Leonard was from, he'd been certain the two of them were meant to return to the twenty-second century together. It had to be fate - why else, in a city of thousands, would Leonard be the first person he met?

He'd been sure that Leonard felt the same way, but something in his voice...

"Do you want to stay?" asked Jim, soft and uncertain. "You don't have to come, you know."

Leonard was silent for long enough that Jim was sure the other man was just trying to determine how to let him down gently. Then gentle fingers reached up to cup Jim's jaw, and Leonard pressed a gentle kiss to the middle of his forehead.

"Idiot," said Leonard affectionately, his breath warm against Jim's skin. "Idiot. Don't you know you're what I've been lookin' for all this time? I'm not lettin' you leave me behind." He pulled back just enough that they could look into each others' eyes. "Besides. I'm kind of curious to see what your time looks like, seeing as it's where I'm from."

Jim laughed, just a little, and leaned forward to capture Leonard's lips in a kiss.

He felt a tug in his navel as the world started to shift and dissolve around them. He held tight to Leonard's hand, warm and solid in his, and waited for space and time to stop spinning.

And when it did, the first thing he saw was Leonard's eyes.

 ****

Epilogue

 **San Francisco - April 19, 2054**

Kenichi met Keiko one year after Leonard and Jim vanished. She'd moved to San Francisco just after the Peace Conference concluded, taking advantage of the abundance of new opportunities that were opening up now that everyone wasn't waiting for the next bomb to fall. Kenichi had first noticed her when he was working on getting new trees and flowers planted all throughout the Castro. She'd been looking at the city with the curious, wondering eyes of a newcomer, her long dark hair blowing gently in the soft breeze. She'd seen him looking and given him such a brilliant smile that Kenichi turned bright red and hurried back to work, but she was still there very time he looked up, and when he was done for the day he manned up and offered to cook her dinner.

The two of them lived in the same tiny shelter that he'd once shared with Leonard and Jim. Kenichi missed them, even though there were times when he was grateful he no longer had to listen to what was happening one bed over in their tiny basement room. Still, whenever he was in the garden he remembered harvesting the daikon roots with Jim, and he kept Leonard's old medical instruments in good repair. He was planning on giving them away eventually - he just needed to find the right person. He was sure that he'd know when he found someone.

Right now Keiko was out tending to the first tender green shoots of the spring plantings, and on impulse he hurried back inside to grab his camera. He crept outside to snapped a quick series of photos just as she was getting to her feet, the late afternoon sun rimming her dark hair with light. She smiled indulgently at him and sauntered over to rest her chin on his shoulder as he flipped back through the images.

"You've gotten pretty good over the years," she said. She reached out and topped the LCD screen just when he landed on a picture he'd taken a little over one year ago. "I like that one. You should print it out and get it framed, maybe."

Kenichi looked down at the smiling faces of himself, Leonard, and Jim, and pressed his finger gently against the screen. He missed them, yes, but he would never forget them.

He would make sure they were never forgotten.

"Yeah," he said, and turned his head to kiss Keiko. "I'll do that."

 **USS _Enterprise_ \- Stardate 2261.157**

Spock was not surprised to find Jim alone on the observation deck with his arms wrapped around his knees and his expression distant. This place had always been the Captain's refuge, and Spock waited quietly for his friend to acknowledge him, knowing that Jim was well aware of his presence.

"Thanks," said Jim finally, and turned his head over his shoulder to smile up at Spock. "I was sure you'd look for me."

Spock knew that Jim was not referring to the fact that it was only thirty minutes until they were scheduled to go on-shift. "The _Enterprise_ will not fly without her captain," replied Spock, moving forward to take his place next to Jim. "As you know perfectly well."

Jim laughed softly. "Why Spock, that was almost poetic."

"Poetry has long held a place of importance in Vulcan culture. Surak himself -"

"I know, I know." Jim leaned over to bump against Spock's shoulder. "Never change, Spock."

They lapsed back into silence, comfortable and familiar. After a moment Spock reached out to brush Jim's fingers in a gentle kiss, aware that it would be their last.

"You've changed since your return," he said softly. "Your mind is more relaxed, steadier. I presume this is because of the doctor."

Jim's smile took on a touch of sadness. "Leonard's what's been missing," he said. "The two of us - we tried because we felt we _had_ to, because of what Old Spock told us. But we're not that Kirk and Spock, and we have to make our own choices."

"Nevertheless, I am and always shall be your friend."

"Well, yeah. I should damn well hope so. But that doesn't mean we have exactly the same relationship as the Kirk and Spock in that other universe."

They turned to look at each other then, and Jim leaned forward to brush Spock's cheekbone with a chaste kiss. "You should go talk to Uhura," he said, his breath warm against Spock's chin. "I always thought the two of you were kinda hot together."

Spock's eyebrow arched upward. "Any attempts to witness our relations first-hand will not be appreciated."

Jim laughed, bright and happy. "Duly noted."

They spent the rest of the time before they needed to report to the bridge gazing out at the stars.

* * *

When Jim came off shift hours later, Leonard was already in their quarters, dressed in pajamas and with his nose buried in a PADD. He was adjusting well, all things considered. M'Benga was already putting him to use in Sickbay, albeit in a limited capacity until he got a bit more comfortable with the new technology and various alien biologies, and he was devouring every bit of medical research he could get his hands on. After so many years of scraping by with minimal supplies, the resources of the _Enterprise_ were like manna from heaven, and Jim loved seeing the excitement in Leonard's face when he talked about how much he'd managed to learn even in a few short days.

There was uneasiness, too, of course. Jim could see the wariness in Leonard's eyes whenever they were in the mess hall, the doubt that such an abundance of food could really be there day after day. He also hadn't slept well the first few nights on the ship, and still spent a good hour tossing and turning before finally settling down. When Jim asked him about it, Leonard said he wasn't used to the quiet, or having such a comfortable bed for a change. Jim could understand that - it had even taken him a few days to readjust, and he hadn't spent his whole life in the twenty-first century the way Leonard had. It was to be expected that it would take Leonard time to adjust to this new time, even if it was technically his home.

Leonard looked up as the door slid softly shut behind Jim and smiled, soft and welcoming. "Hey."

"Hey yourself." Jim stepped forward and settled comfortably in Leonard's lap, nuzzling into the crook of his neck. "You smell good."

Leonard snorted, but his fingers came up to stroke gently through Jim's hair.

They basked in contented silence for a minute, then Jim pulled back so he could look into Leonard's eyes. "Are you happy here?" he asked, soft and serious. "I mean, really happy? Not just because of me?"

Leonard reached up to trace the curve of Jim's cheek. He didn't say that he loved Jim, that Jim was enough to make happy; that wasn't what Jim was asking, and he knew it. When he answered, his voice was steady and sure.

"I'm happy, Jim. I don't regret it."

Jim sighed in relief and leaned forward, pressing their lips together in a soft kiss and twining their fingers together tightly.

There would be more close calls, more dangerous missions in the future. But they both knew, all the way down to their bones, that they didn't need to fear what was coming. They'd found each other, after all, in the midst of all of time and space, and together -

\- together, they could face anything.


End file.
